Wilhelm Meise
Wilhelm Meise ( born September 12, 1901 in Essen, † August 24, 2002 in Hamburg ) was a German ornithologist.
Life and work
1924 Wilhelm Meise wrote at the Friedrich -Wilhelms -Universität zu Berlin. He studied zoology, botany, chemistry, geography and mathematics. At the suggestion of Erwin Stresemann in 1928, he wrote his doctoral thesis entitled The spread of Aaskrahe ( form circle Corvus corone L.) on the distribution of the carrion crow and its hybridization with the hooded crow. The results of this study have been cited in numerous textbooks as an example of the hybridization of birds at the species level. In 1929 he moved to Dresden and was curator in the Department of vertebrates at Museum of Zoology Dresden. In 1930 he married. From this marriage three children were born. In 1936 he published the study to systematics and distribution history of the house and willow sparrows, Passer domesticus L. and hispaniolensis T.: About speciation by crossing in the bird world, in which he described the systematic and evolutionary relationships between the house sparrow and the willow sparrow, and in particular the status of Italy sparrow examined.
After he had spent three years in a POW camp in Siberia, he became in 1950 assistant at the Berlin Museum of Natural History. In 1951 he was curator of ornithology at the Zoological Staalsinstitut and Zoological Museum in Hamburg and assistant professor at the University of Hamburg. He held until 1969 or 1972 These positions. From 1952 to 1962 he was president of the Association Jordsand. In 1955 he undertook an expedition to Angola. In the following years he published several scientific papers on the geographical variations, the speciation and the evolution of African birds. Between 1960 and published in 1992 Meise 47 parts of the manual of Oologie, a book series that was started in 1960 by Max Good weather and continued after his death on 21 April 1961 by Wilhelm Meise. The work on 3666 pages describes all bird species and sub-species, their eggs are known.
Meise's about 170 publications deal mainly with birds, but occasionally also with the systematics of scorpions, spiders, lizards, snakes and molluscs. He contributed to the Encyclopedia Grzimek's animal life and translated English works such as Birds of the World by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher into German. In 1972 he went into retirement. Only a month before his 101st birthday, he died in 2002 in Hamburg.