Boris Karlovich Stegmann (or Shtegmann) (: 25 December 1898 – 28 December 1975) was a Russian

ornithologist Ornithology, from Ancient Greek ὄρνις (''órnis''), meaning "bird", and -logy from λόγος (''lógos''), meaning "study", is a branch of zoology dedicated to the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related discip ...

of German descent who worked on

zoogeography Zoogeography is the branch of the science of biogeography that is concerned with geographic distribution (present and past) of animal species. As a multifaceted field of study, zoogeography incorporates methods of molecular biology, genetics, mo ...

and introduced the idea of faunal affinities or "faunal types" to subdivide the palearctic region. An influential comparative anatomy of the avian forelimb was published posthumously.

Biography

Stegmann was born in

Pskov Pskov ( rus, Псков, a=Ru-Псков.oga, p=psˈkof; see also Names of Pskov in different languages, names in other languages) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city in northwestern Russia and the administrative center of Pskov O ...

, Russia. He worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1921 in the ornithology department. He became a research assistant in 1928 and worked on various bird groups. In 1938 he published his ideas on nine avifaunal centres within the Old World. This was an influential work in its time. In 1938 his German ancestry led to his arrest but he was released after a year and a half. But after the beginning of World War II he was expelled from Leningrand and forced to work in

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a landlocked country primarily in Central Asia, with a European Kazakhstan, small portion in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the Kazakhstan–Russia border, north and west, China to th ...

. Exiled along with his wife Tatiana Savelyeva in the Balkash region of central Asia, he continued his research on birds in the region until 1954. In 1964 he published a volume on the birds of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

along with Aleksandr Ivanovich Ivanov. He also worked on molluscs and on the evolution of birds. He published a key to the bird families of the Soviet Union and took a special interest in the corvids. In 1978 a manuscript on the comparative anatomy of the avian forelimb was published posthumously with a preface by

Walter Bock Walter Bock (20 January 1895 – 25 October 1948)Death record Nr. 3271/Köln I for Ludwig Walter Robert Bock of Oct. 26, 1948, Landesarchiv NRW, Duisburg was a German chemist who developed styrene-butadiene , styrene-butadiene copolymer by emul ...

. In 1951 he wrote a biographical memoir which was briefly printed but destroyed by political censors. A copy was rediscovered and republished in 2004. Several subspecies of bird including ''Charadrius mongolus stegmanni'', ''Tetrao urogalloides stegmanni'', ''Passer montanus stegmanni'', ''Falco tinnunculus stegmanni'', ''Cyanopica cyanus stegmanni'' and ''Phragmaticola aёdon stegmanni'' have been named after him.

References

External links

Chronology

Вороновые птицы.
(1932) (Corvidae)
Основы орнитографического деления Палеарктики
(1938) (Ornithological divisions of the palearctic region)
Определитель Семейств Птиц CCCP
(1933) (Key to the bird families of the USSR)
Relationships of the superorders Alectoromorphae and Charadriomorphae (Aves) : a comparative study of the avian hand
(1978) *
Exile case history archives
1898 births 1975 deaths Biogeographers Soviet ornithologists Russian people of German descent People from Pskov {{ornithologist-stub