3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Birdwatching 21
he simply smoked cigars. He had a long, dark brown beard and was always dressed
for the outdoors. I believe just about all of his income came from writing popular
nature articles for various magazines and from his nature photography. He was
a very good photographer, even in the technical matters of developing his films or
plates.
Zimmermann never had any formal education. I presume that he finished
some kind of a high school, but that was all. Everything he knew (and he had an
enormous amount of knowledge) was acquired by reading. Why he engaged in
all that is quite a puzzle to me. He was, of course, a bachelor; perhaps his speech
defect—particularly when a little excited he stammered badly—contributed to his
solitude. This was, of course, the reason why he couldn’t earn his living as a teacher
or lecturer.
I often visited him in his room because he had so many interesting books
and could tell so many interesting stories about birds and their lives. He never
ceased emphasizing how important it was to study the living bird, that one needed
patience, that one should sit by a nest or watch a displaying bird by the hour and
only thus could one get the exact details of what was going on. Most importantly,
he took me along on some of his excursions to the Lausitz region [east of Dresden]
with its innumerable ponds and marvelous bird life. Here he showed me how to
findthenestsofallsortsofbirds,anddeterminedwhichoneswereapttobe
parasitized by the cuckoo. He had a splendid knowledge of its habits, and he could
tell the cuckoo egg from the own eggs of the birds, etc. One of his weaknesses,
however, was that he did not carefully record everything he saw; so much of his
immense knowledge of bird life died with him. He was just as much the opposite
of the American birdwatcher as one could possibly think. He was not concerned
with records and rarities but with the living bird and its behavior.
I remember on one of the trips we came to a fish pond that had just been
emptied in order to catch all the carp that were in the pond. However, in one of
the drainage ditches Zimmermann spotted a carp that had been forgotten. He
picked it up and put it somewhere, presumably in his pocket. After much more
birding, we finally caught the last train back to Dresden. It was too late for me to
go home, I think it was about midnight, so I went to Zimmermann’s room. There
he cooked the carp on the alcohol burner and we had a delicious meal at about
1:00 am. Then I laid down on the floor and slept soundly until about 6:00 am. I said
goodbye to Zimmermann and walked to my own home, where my mother was
rather astonished when I appeared ringing the bell at 7:00 am.
The lessons Zimmermann taught me at my most impressionable age have stayed
with me all my life. Alas, in New Guinea, the collecting of birds took so much
of my time that there was no opportunity, really, for making good life history
observations.
As I have mentioned already, Zimmermann had a splendid library. It included
such rarities as the major book by Pernau [1720]. Alas, I am told, that all this,
including a valuable series of periodicals, was destroyed during the infamous
Dresden bombing [in February 1945].