Elizabeth Vladimirovna Kozlova née Pushkariova (19 August 1892 – 10 February 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 ...

who worked on the

avifauna Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight ...

of the

Tibetan plateau The Tibetan Plateau, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or Qingzang Plateau, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central Asia, Central, South Asia, South, and East Asia. Geographically, it is located to the north of H ...

Life and career

Elizabeth was the daughter of

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

physician Vladimir Pushkariov born in

Krasnoye Selo Krasnoye Selo (, lit. ''Red (or beautiful) village''). Г. П. Смолицкая. "Топонимический словарь Центральной России". "Армада-Пресс", 2002 is a municipal town in Krasnos ...

. In 1910, at the age of 18, she was in Normandy where she impressed the famous Colonel

Pyotr Kozlov Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov (; 3 October 1863 in Dukhovshchina – 26 September 1935 in Peterhof) was a Russian and Soviet traveller and explorer who continued the studies of Nikolai Przhevalsky in Mongolia and Tibet. Biography Although prepar ...

, a well-known explorer 29 years her senior. A fan of the explorer

Nikolai Przhevalsky Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky (or Prjevalsky;; , . – ) was a Russian geographer and a renowned explorer of Central and East Asia. Although he never reached his ultimate goal, the city of Lhasa in Tibet, he still travelled through regio ...

, he was smitten by the explorer in her and he divorced his wife Nadezhda Stepanovna Kamynina (married 1891) and married Elizabeth in 1912.Department of Ornithology – HistoryMearns & Mearns (1998). The couple lived in Smolny Prospect 6 and began to travel widely together. From 1923–1926 she took part as the professional ornithologist in an expedition, organised by the

Russian Geographical Society The Russian Geographical Society (), or RGO, is a learned society based in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It promotes geography, exploration and nature protection with research programs in fields including oceanography, ethnography, ecology and stati ...

and led by her husband, to

Mongolia Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south and southeast. It covers an area of , with a population of 3.5 million, making it the world's List of countries and dependencies by po ...

. She returned to Mongolia in 1929 and 1930 to collect and to conduct further bird studies, her research resulting in the publication in 1930 of ''Birds of South-western Transbaikalia, Northern Mongolia and the Central Gobi'', for which she was awarded the Geographical Society's Silver Medal. Kozlova was based at the Department of Ornithology in the Zoological Institute of the

Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation; and additional scientific and social units such ...

in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) from 1932 to 1975. During the Second World War, the institute was moved to

Dushanbe Dushanbe is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Tajikistan. , Dushanbe had a population of 1,564,700, with this population being largely Tajiks, Tajik. Until 1929, the city was known in Russian as Dyushambe, and from 1929 to 1961 as St ...

, Tajikistan. During this period Kozlova studied mountain birds including the biology of ''Phasianus colchicus bianchii''. After returning to Leningrad to 1945, she no longer went on field expeditions. She then produced the

monograph A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

s ''Avifauna of the Tibetan Plateau, its Genetic Relationships and History'' in 1952, and ''The Birds of Zonal Steppes and Deserts of Central Asia'' in 1975. She also published many papers on avian

taxonomy image:Hierarchical clustering diagram.png, 280px, Generalized scheme of taxonomy Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme o ...

and

phylogeny A phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or Taxon, taxa during a specific time.Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, M ...

as well as writing extensive sections of ''The Birds of the USSR'' (1951–1953) and the series ''Fauna of the USSR''. The

Great Grey Owl The great grey owl (''Strix nebulosa'') (also great gray owl in American English) is a true owl, and is the world's largest species of owl by length. It is distributed across the Northern Hemisphere, and it is the only species in the genus ''Str ...

''(Strix nebulosa elisabethae)'' and the Ortolan bunting ''(Emberiza hortulana elisabethae)'' are named after her.

References

Notes

Sources

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kozlova, Elizabeth 1892 births 1975 deaths People from Krasnoye Selo People from Tsarskoselsky Uyezd Soviet ornithologists Women ornithologists