Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

16 1 Childhood and Youth
series. Certainly, this reading furthered Ernst’s tendencies and he acquired a great
speed in flying diagonally across a page for contents rather than looking for literary
style (see also p. 33). This way, he consumed most of Karl May’s adventure stories
and often managed to read an entire 400 to 500-page volume in a single evening.
He devoured all the books he could get on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions and
on travels to unknown parts of South America, Africa, and Asia. In particular he
was fascinated by the travels of the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin to Tibet. He read
on different topics including geology, anthropology, and art history. In fact, there
was a time at the gymnasium when he thought of studying art history as his life’s
subject. Ornithology remained strictly a hobby.
At about 14 years of age, he started a “most active ornithological period stimulated,
I am embarrassed to admit it, by competition with another student in my
class in the Gymnasium, who bragged about his knowledge of birds. That was
more than I could endure. However, I was also the friend of a forester’s son in
Moritzburg, with whom, for instance, I tried to observe a badger. In Dresden, if
weather was reasonable, I went birdwatching almost every single day. As soon as
I had a bicycle, I also traveled to the Lausitz, to Moritzburg, and to mountainous
areas east and south of Dresden. Once I got word that a nightingale was singing
about twenty kilometers from Dresden, I immediately got on my bicycle and was
more than elated actually to hear the bird singing.”
During the winter of 1919–1920, the young birdwatcher checked almost daily on
the birds in the Grosse Garten, a large city park. He observed that the Bohemian
Waxwings were rather common there feeding on mistletoes in the large Linden
trees and he found out which of the old hollow trees was the home of the Tawny
Owl. In spring, he checked on the nests of Blackbird Turdus merula and Songthrush
T. philomelos using a mirror with a long handle to see the contents of their nests.
However,therewasnobodytoadvisehimaboutsomeconstructiveresearchorthe
literature. His guide was Alwin Voigt’s Excursion Book for the Study of Bird Voices.
It offered a system of signs representing bird calls and songs. This seemed to him
more useful than Bernhard Hoffmann’s book (1919) where bird songs and call
notes were described in musical symbols. At school, he enjoyed most the biology
course and did a lot of reading on biological subject matter. He also took a course
in local flowers and learned how to identify them with the help of identification
keys. He was a good high school student but judged by his classmate, Karl Baessler,
when asked in 1990, there was nothing particular pointing to his later success in
science.
In 1920 and 1921, he entered in his notebook 25 detailed bicycle routes that he
took around Dresden for birdwatching, carefully noting the distances and times
spent (ranging between 23 km in 2 h and 178 km in 10 h).
“I used to be an enthusiastic bicyclist myself while I was a bird student in
Germany. The poor bike certainly suffered very much. I used to take it through
swamps and over the beach, through woods and over fences. It is really much
handier for birding than the automobile, and after a while one gets so good at it
that one can ride almost anywhere. Besides it is good exercise” (letter to J.P. Chapin,
1 December 1936).