I shall use my endeavour to give you an account of all the hard-beaked Bird wich feed upon Seeds, and are most plentiful with us here in England; the first I shall begin withal is the Bird called the Canary-Bird, because the Original of that bird came from thence (I hold this to be the best Song-Bird); But now with industry they breed them very plentifully in Germany, and in Italy also; and they have bred some few here in England, though as yet not anything to the purpose as they do in other Countries.
JOSEPH BLAGRAVE, Epitome of the Art of Husbandry (1675)
Hans Duncker was born on 26 May 1881, some three years before Gregor Mendel died. Duncker’s birthplace was the town of Ballenstedt in the eastern foothills of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany, the very core of German bird-keeping country.1 People here had caught and kept birds, and exploited the singing abilities of species like the chaffinch, since the Middle Ages. When the canary first came to the region in the late 1700s, miners and artisans put their hearts and minds into making it the ultimate singing bird – one that eventually became known worldwide as the Harz Mountain roller. The scale on which they eventually did this is almost inconceivable. By the 1880s, in one of the most remarkable cottage industries in history, Harz families were fledging more than 150,000 male canaries each year.
The second of three sons, Hans Duncker grew up amidst this bird-keeping culture. Everywhere he went there were caged birds, a colourful, vociferous array of wild-caught birds and roller canaries; in doorways, hanging outside houses, in shops and in cafés there were singing birds. His grandfather encouraged his interest in birds and took Hans to family friends who had aviaries full of native finches and canaries – wonderful combinations of colour and voice. There were siskins and serins, wild canaries and greenfinches whose plumage was as bright as fresh foliage in dappled sunlight; there were chaffinches, redpolls, linnets and bullfinches whose breasts were as pink as the blushes of teenage girls; and then there was the favourite, the multicoloured goldfinch – a blaze of crimson and gold, black, white and beige – twisting and turning almost like a clockwork toy. Even the canaries’ brilliant yellow plumage didn’t seem out of place. But it wasn’t just their appearance that was inspiring, the continuous birdsong made everyone in Ballenstedt feel as though they were living in the forests and fields. The music of nature was spiritually uplifting and almost everyone was an enthusiast. Men returning home from work in the evening went to their birds before going into the house to greet wife and family. It was hardly surprising, then, that young Hans, shy and somewhat serious, should turn to birds for his studies. His father, a high-ranking judge, decided that if Hans wanted to study birds he should do it properly and train as a biologist. It was a long slog: birds, and cage birds in particular, were the domain of amateurs rather than professional scientists. In order to get to a position where he could focus his efforts entirely on them, Hans had first to serve an apprenticeship. He did well at school, especially in maths, physics, sports and singing, but he hated languages and found French and English a struggle. At eighteen he was sent off to the other side of the mountains to study biology. The university at Göttingen was not only the closest but among the oldest and the very best in Germany. Its medieval half-timbered buildings dominated the small town, as did its elite fraternities of male students who sought recognition not only by their success in examinations but also by the sword, their facial scars the ultimate signals of status.2
Initially Duncker concentrated on botany and physics, but after a year-long visit to Leipzig University in 1901 he was able to begin his zoological studies. Returning to Göttingen in the Easter of 1902 he sought out Ernst Ehlers, grandseigneur of animal structure and close friend of Ernst Haeckel, Germany’s greatest zoologist and most ardent Darwinian. One of Haeckel’s many claims to fame was his idea of plotting the branching paths of common descent on to evolutionary trees, and he entreated Ehlers and his students to do the same. Ehlers in turn encouraged students like Duncker to read Haeckel’s monumental works, including his popular versions of Darwin’s ideas. By examining the internal structure of different animals, mainly invertebrates such as slugs, snails and worms, Ehlers could judge how closely related they were and then position them on the appropriate branches of the tree of life. Zoology in the early 1900s comprised little more than the detailed study of morphology – and deciding whether animals had been put together by God or natural selection. For Ehlers, as for Haeckel, there was no question: natural selection had created life’s wonders. Ehlers gave Duncker a doctoral project that involved identifying the relationship between a few more twigs on the tree of life. The work entailed comparing, dissecting and describing the internal structure of a group of marine worms. This wasn’t quite as dull as it first sounds, for these were among the most gorgeous of all worms – affectionately known as ‘sea mice’ for their squat and hairy appearance. Linnaeus had been so impressed by their iridescent beauty that he christened the commonest form ‘Aphrodite’. Ehlers used the worm project to drill into Hans the scientists’ ‘right stuff’: persistence, integrity and imagination.3
Away from Göttingen’s laboratories and lecture theatres, Duncker was an active member of ‘Germania’, the National Christian student fraternity, and another Christian society, ‘Schwartzburgbund’, which approved of chastity and disapproved of duelling. Despite his Christian upbringing, Duncker was converted to Darwinism by Ehlers and remained a firm believer in evolution by natural selection for the rest of his life. He was a model student and did well.4 Following his oral examination on 15 February 1905, he graduated magna cum laude – the second-best grade – in zoology, botany and mathematics. Thereafter he was Herr Doktor Duncker.
On their own, worms were not enough, and between dissections Hans continued to pursue his interest in birds – in particular, their migrations. For centuries it had been known that entire populations of birds appeared and disappeared at predictable times of year, but only in the past few years had there been any attempt to assess these movements in a scientific way. The first bird observatory, at Rossitten in East Prussia, had been set up in 1903 specifically to employ the new technique of marking birds with metal rings to track their subsequent movements. The establishment of this ringing station helped to make bird migration a hot topic once again, even though Duncker was personally sceptical about the value of ringing birds, Nonetheless, in the year before he completed his thesis Friedrich Voss, a friend, encouraged Duncker to give a talk on migration. Always conscientious, Hans hurried off to the university’s magnificent, ancient library to swat up on the subject and nervously prepare for his first public performance. He need not have worried. He had a natural flair for public speaking and with the migratory journeys of birds one of the most extraordinary aspects of biology, his talk was an enormous success. Encouraged by Ehlers, Duncker decided to turn his lecture into something more substantial, and was soon back in the library searching for new information and plotting the migration paths of birds across the entire northern hemisphere.
For centuries men have gouged silver, iron and coal from beneath the Harz Mountains. The same men have also kept birds. Birds were the miners’ saviours and for centuries locally caught chaffinches had been carried underground to warn of poisonous gas. Once canaries arrived in the Harz region around 1800 they took over this role. A canary in a coal mine became an enduring image: a speck of life in dreadful, dangerous blackness, whose high metabolic rate and sophisticated respiratory system made it supremely sensitive to poison gas. The merest whiff of carbon monoxide or fire-damp – an explosive mixture of air and methane – would knock a canary fluttering from its perch, providing its owner with a clear signal to retreat. The long history of birds underground forged an almost unbreakable chain of mutual dependence between miners and songbirds.5
German bird keeping extended well beyond the Harz Mountains and well beyond those who toiled underground. By the late 1800s keeping small birds in cages was a national obsession. In medieval times the catching of small birds was one of four noble and status-enhancing pursuits along with hunting, falconry and fishing.6 A hierarchy even existed among these different activities, with men who killed deer or boars deemed braver than those who used falcons and hawks to take partridges, who in turn were more worthy than those who plucked little birds from the sky. Fishing, the most solitary and static of these activities, conferred the least status. Nonetheless, all who partook in these sports regarded themselves superior to common peasants.
Books describing techniques for each form of hunting proliferated across Europe, especially in England.In his little book, Hungers Prevention, published in 1621, Gervase Markham7 said that small birds have two uses: ‘either pleasure or food, pleasure because everyone of them naturally, have excellent Fielde-Notes, and may therefore be kept in cages and nourisht in their owne tunes, or also trayned to any other notes, or else for food, being of pleasant taste, and exceeding much nourishing, by reason of their Naturelle heat, and light digestion’.
Most small birds fell into one or the other of Markham’s categories: for eating or keeping, but larks had the misfortune to have both a wonderful song and a wonderful flavour – their tongues (in reality their breasts) were considered the most succulent of all meat – and larks became a prime target for bird catchers everywhere. The Italian historian and cleric Polydore Vergil,8 who lived in England between 1501 and 1550, wrote, ‘The cheefe foode of the Englisheman consisteth in fleshe . . . Of wilde burdes these are most delicate, partriches, pheasunts, quayles, owsels, thrusshes and larckes. This last burde, in winter season, the wether being not owtragios, doth waxe wonerus fatte, at which time a wonderful nombre of them is caughte, so that of all others they chefle garnish menns tables.’
Although eating was an important end product of catching, a common motivation, as in any form of hunting, was success in catching and the status it conferred. The quest for status inserts itself into all pursuits; catching small birds was no different and the result was a rapid evolution of catching techniques. Like species themselves, these evolved from a few simple forms until, by the Middle Ages, bird trappers employed a staggering array of bizarre and dreadfully effective techniques. Methods that failed became extinct, while those that succeeded, like their owners, proliferated.
The best time to catch birds was when they migrated, because they usually did so in huge numbers and in predictable places. As birds move from their summer breeding grounds to wintering locations and back again they funnel in vast numbers through mountain passes, along headlands and across islands. Autumn is the best time of all for catching because as the birds move south for some reason they do so on a much narrower front than they do on their return journey. October and November were the peak trapping periods, and if you look hard at Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Return of the Herd, part of a series known as ‘The Months’, you can see – near its centre – a bird catcher concealed behind a bush, beside his net. The bird catcher is one of Bruegel’s time markers. The other marker, just in case there was any doubt, is the grape harvest in the bottom right-hand corner, for this was October. There was an added bonus in hunting migrants. As they travel from their winter to summer quarters and back again, small birds are loaded with fat – fuel for the journey – and some more than double their weight with fat before setting off, making them especially tasty.
Throughout October and November, thrushes and larks move from northern Europe into Spain and France, and finches and warblers swoop off the toe of Italy, over Malta and on to North Africa. Millions of birds, large and small, migrate each autumn over the Mediterranean, crossing at narrows and using islands as stepping stones to minimise the risks. Every Mediterranean island was a hotbed of hunters. Some, like Malta and Cyprus, still are.9
The gourmand’s favourite small bird was, and still is, the ortolan bunting;10 and in the past vast numbers of these birds were captured alive and fed oats and millet seed until they became ‘lumps of fat three ounces in weight’. Now they are caught – illegally – for specialist French restaurants to satisfy clients who each year eagerly await the discreet telephone call to let them know the birds are in. Behind locked doors they assemble for this sensual gastronomic ritual. A woman who had been to one of these gatherings described to me the technique for eating a cooked bunting: ‘I was told very firmly to put the whole very hot bird in my mouth and then to press it up against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, rather than biting it. This makes the juice and the fat explode into your mouth, which I have to say is the best bit of the whole experience, since all you are left with after that is a mouthful of fine bones.’
Duncker’s lecture and his subsequent book on bird migration were based on knowledge that came originally from bird catchers. For these men knowing about migration was no mere intellectual exercise but a matter of life and death. To be successful, bird catchers needed to know where and when birds would be moving. Natural selection operated on trapping sites just as much as it did on trapping methods and the trappers themselves. The Italians’ gustatory obsession with birds drove them to create leafy replicas of Stonehenge, known as roccoli – gigantic bird-catching structures – dotted across the mountain passes of northern Italy, whose locations tracked with deadly precision the exact migration paths of small birds as they crossed the Alps. In Germany and the Low Countries trappers used a different method – huge clap nets – established at fixed locations known as Vogelherds – bird yards or, tellingly, bird ovens.11
The vital role of bird catching in local economies is reflected in the huge number of places across Europe whose names are linked with trapping.12 In Germany literally hundreds of places have names like Finken-feld (finch field), Lerchen-feld (lark field), Lerchen-berg (lark mountain) and Vogelherd (bird oven). In Britain such names occur less frequently because, unlike their German counterparts who maintained traditional fixed trapping sites, the British bird catcher was more mobile and opportunistic. Nonetheless, English bird trapping is immortalised by such places as Finchingfield and Larkhill in Essex.
The catching and keeping of birds, and observing them in captivity, were the beginnings of ornithology. Like all successful hunters, bird catchers had to know their quarry; they had to know first and foremost how to distinguish the different species – something we take for granted today, but before the Late Middle Ages often a puzzle – especially in those species where males and females differ in their plumage. Trappers had to know where wild birds would be at particular times of the year, what they ate, and how they responded to members of their own and other species. Such knowledge was the beginning of avian ecology. The careful observations of caged birds – in particular how and when they sang – provided the start of the study of animal behaviour, and observations of where birds were and went, the inception of the study of migration.13
Bird catching is illegal now across much of Europe, and those roccoli and Vogelherds that survive have become respectable bird-ringing stations for the ongoing study of migration. The old catching methods have all but disappeared, replaced by the amazingly effective Japanese mist nets, but the motivation is the same and even though few bird ringers would admit it, the real buzz is still the catching. In a few places, such as Castricum on the Dutch coast, the old Vogelherd clap nets are still used to catch birds in a kind of living museum. When I arrived one mild October morning before dawn I found the bird catchers already at work – their nets were set and they were waiting for the flocks of migrants that would set off down the coast as soon as there was sufficient light. As the dawn broke I could see the huge nets lying flat on the ground about twenty metres from the little hut in which we stood. Surrounding the nets were small cages, each one containing a different bird. In the past these decoy birds would have been blinded – making them easier to manage and less easily distracted from their main purpose of singing.14 The effect of the decoys was almost uncanny. Waves of migrants appeared from the north flying low across the dunes, but the singing decoys caused them to hesitate and swoop down for a closer look. As they did so the ‘catcher’, who controlled the cable running out to the net, had to decide when to pull. If he got it wrong, the birds veered safely off and precious catching time was wasted resetting the nets. If he got it right, the two halves of the net swept over like a pair of gigantic jaws, plucking the birds from the air and pinning them to the ground.
We watched through the tiny windows as a flock of small birds approached. The decoys called; beguiled, the migrants descended and momentarily fluttered over the nets. The man pulled. Success! We ran out and picked up the pipits struggling beneath the nets and handed them to the ringers. Ours was a modest catch – just three birds. But in the past these trapping sites, known as ‘vinkenbaan’ – the Dutch equivalent of Vogelherd – were sometimes much more successful. Vinkenbaans were the property of wealthy landowners who employed bird catchers to provide birds for the table. The birds were considered a crop and catchers were required to keep meticulous records of everything they caught. For one trapper who worked on the estate of Cornelius van Lennep, 9 October 1790 was a particularly memorable day: in a single pull of the net he caught 203 birds.15
The catching and keeping of birds has always been associated with status and, among males at least, status has always been linked with sex. The acquisition and ownership of birds provide wonderful examples of the power of sexual selection to drive men to extreme behaviour. As with other hunters, the more successful a bird catcher, the greater his status in the local community, and men also gave birds to women as courtship gifts.
Agnès Sorel was a medieval beauty, with a face and figure to die for. She was smart, too. Joining the household of Charles VII, King of France, as a teenage servant in 1443, Agnès used her looks to catch the royal eye. I can only imagine that for the king it must have been like having Nigella Lawson in the kitchen and inevitably he became besotted by her. Other members of the court were extremely critical of Agnès’s tactics, referring to her as the ‘begetter and inventor of all that can lead to ribaudise and dissoluteness in the manner of costume’, by which they meant she wore extremely revealing dresses, which exposed her ample bosom. Charles wooed her, by giving her a canary – along with several castles and estates – and Agnès soon became the first royal mistress. Canaries were rare, having just appeared in Europe and they were the ultimate status symbol, for both giver and receiver. The canary was also a deeply symbolic gift. Men gave them and women adored them – enchanted by their sweet voice and endearing nature. Agnès loved the canary and Charles too, bearing him four children and eventually becoming more powerful than the queen. For years after her suspiciously premature death in 1450, her beauty was celebrated in French paintings of the Madonna, usually suckling the infant Christ, providing a perfect excuse for displaying her magnificent figure in what now seem to be curiously ambiguous religious images.16
Agnès Sorel and Charles VII provide a revealing object lesson in contemporary evolutionary psychology. Agnès was everything the forty-year-old king could ever wish for; she was young, beautiful and irresistibly sexy. For his part Charles was everything Agnès could ever want: immensely rich and very powerful. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that the obsession of men with young and beautiful women is entirely explicable in Darwinian terms. A woman’s good looks usually go hand in hand with youth and youth denotes fertility. Men prefer younger women because they’ll give them the best return in terms of offspring and beautiful women make healthy, fertile partners. For a woman, a man’s looks are almost immaterial – just think of all those ugly old men with beautiful wives or mistresses. What women want in a man is money and power, two attributes that usually go together. Men with resources determine a woman’s reproductive output. With access to plenty of money, women can produce lots of healthy babies and ensure that they have the best possible upbringing, education and care. And it is precisely for this reason that the old men with beautiful partners are always rich.
While women strive to be beautiful and – literally – attractive, men aspire to be powerful.17 Men need status and prestige to gain power. Not every man can be king and not every woman can be as beautiful as Agnès Sorel, but each of us does the best we can in the mate acquisition game – either consciously or unconsciously. For a man, getting a partner is all about competing with other men for status and then displaying that status in some way. Acquiring a partner can also be competitive for women, but it is more about choosing between different men. This difference in the mate acquisition strategies of each sex is Darwin’s idea of sexual selection and he was well aware of the central importance of male status for both animals and humans alike: ‘Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright.’18
His views were undoubtedly shaped by Victorian sexism and Darwin considered the creative achievements of men as equivalent to a peacock’s tail or, more precisely, the bower bird’s bower – an extension of themselves – and what Richard Dawkins calls an extended phenotype.19 Catching birds was a male display, but so was owning them, and a bird that was both attractive and unusual – like an albino, a rare hybrid or a red canary – was a wonderful extended phenotype. Bird catchers enjoyed a special kind of prestige allowing them to reap its most important biological reward. In Germany and the Netherlands, and probably elsewhere, bird catchers had a reputation as womanisers, not least because they often took young women with them to their remote trapping locations. This may explain a curious imagery that arose in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, when bird trapping became a symbol for love and sexual intercourse. A caged bird – in Dutch ‘vogel’ – symbolised the happy slavery of someone in love, whereas, ‘vogelen’ was the vernacular term for the sexual act. This connotation of bird trapping appears in numerous European works of art and is particularly explicit in Jan Steen’s painting Rustic Love, completed around 1660. The picture shows a young couple frolicking in the open air; an enthusiastic young man about to capture a young woman. Above them in a tree is a cage trap, with its trapdoor wide open and decoy bird inside.20 The same kind of double entendre occurs many times over in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in which the part of Papageno, the bird catcher, is another play on the German ‘Vogel’ and ‘vögeln’, just as it is in Dutch. Papageno’s song at the start of the opera goes:
The bird catcher am I and always merry, tra la la!
As the birdcatcher I am known, by young and old throughout the land.
I know how to set decoys and whistle just like my prey.
So merry and carefree can I be, knowing all the birds belong to me.
All the birds belong to me. Even today birdwatchers in Germany are confronted with this sexual innuendo every time they tell others about their hobby. Vogel means bird and vögeln means to fuck so ‘going birding’ in Germany is a dubious pursuit. The same thing exists in Britain, too, where a ‘bird’ or a ‘chick’ refers to a girl – a dual meaning that also dates back to the heyday of bird catching – even the words ‘bird’ and ‘bride’ have the same root.21 Pulling a bird – an English expression denoting a man’s success at initiating a liaison with a woman – refers to the act of pulling the clap net ropes to capture birds, just as the phrase ‘picking up a bird’ refers to what one did after a bird was caught under the clap net. In Italy, the sexual innuendo is even more explicit. The word for bird, uccello is slang for ‘penis’, much like ‘cock’ in English, and passera, literally ‘little sparrow’, refers to the vagina.
The link between bird catching and sex persists to this day. Once, when I was in a remote and mountainous part of Spain with two old bird trappers, one of the men caught a bright-red cock linnet. After disentangling it from the sticky bird lime with which it had been trapped, he held it by its feet to show his friend. Then, in one swift movement, and entirely for my benefit, he momentarily held the bird against his friend’s groin, throwing me a cheeky glance as he did so – the clearest signal that for them the red bird was equivalent to a penis.22
The Reverend Hugh MacPherson also noticed the association between bird catching and sex, and illustrated it by using a particular painting as the frontispiece to his book The History of Fowling published in 1897. The painting was Spring by the French artist Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), imitator and one-time pupil of Watteau, painted in 1738, and it provides a particularly explicit illustration of this link. The eighteenth century was a saucy and frivolous period among the French aristocracy whose amorous, aimless antics were immortalised by artists like Watteau, Fragonard and Lancret but were later brought to an abrupt halt by the Revolution. Lancret’s picture shows two bird catchers, one playing his flute, the other about to pull on the clap net rope, and they are accompanied by no fewer than four gorgeous young women, each one egging the men on to catch songbirds for them. This is sexual selection in action. The two men are competing and, as MacPherson points out, keen to exhibit ‘their skill as fowlers to the graceful dames whose smiles they strove so earnestly to win’. Lancret’s painting has a double poignancy – catching wild birds to catch what they hope will be wild women. For the bird catchers success brought at least a twofold benefit: it demonstrated their skill and enabled them to offer a nuptial gift in the form of a songbird – much cherished by upper-class ladies.23
Hans Duncker completed his book Wanderzug der Vögel (The Migration Routes of Birds) in March 1905. It so impressed Ehlers that he encouraged Duncker to apply for a Göttingen University prize, the Petsche-Labarrestiftung, which he duly won. Duncker was delighted and dedicated the book to his ‘highly admired teacher, Ernst Ehlers on the occasion of his seventieth birthday’. His formal training now over and with a prize and doctorate in the same year, Duncker moved north to Bremen to begin his career as a high-school teacher. The Old Gymnasium was a classical state school and the best in Bremen, situated in a busy part of town adjoining its oldest district – the Schnoor, with its tiny medieval houses and narrow winding streets. Carved above its main entrance in big gold letters was the school’s motto: Ingenuarum artium studiis sacrum – Dedicated to the Study of the Most Excellent Arts.
The Bremen to which Duncker moved in 1906 was a prosperous middle-class place. One of Germany’s Hanseatic cities, its people were liberal, free and confident. Located on the Weser river, which ran broad and navigable a full fifty kilometres inland from Bremerhaven on the North Sea coast, Bremen was a busy, bustling port filled with the aroma of roasting coffee, one of the city’s key imports. This was a civic society, in which commissions of honorary members took care of public and cultural life. Society ladies were identified by their tailor-made suits, pink nail polish and pearls, and season tickets to the opera. To thrive in Bremen one had to adopt the soft-spoken, formal manners of the local bourgeoisie. Duncker, with his three-piece suits, cigars and solemn academic confidence, seemed a perfect fit, although his restrained exterior concealed an inner dynamic enthusiasm for anything he decided to tackle. Anywhere else in Germany the title Herr Doktor, which under German law was now an official part of Duncker’s name, would have given him a head start, but in Bremen, a city brim-full of wealthy merchants, consuls and businessmen, it offered no special privileges. The director of Bremen’s psychiatric clinic summed up the situation by saying, ‘the Bremen people keep some scientists as princes used to keep jesters’.
One of the first things Duncker did on moving to Bremen was to join its natural history society, based in the city museum. Built only ten years earlier, in 1896, the museum was located on the edge of the huge plaza outside the equally recent and architecturally magnificent railway station. The Übersee-Museum was a typical product of its age: a huge neoclassical building whose hard edges were softened by two voluptuous sphinxes guarding its entrance and a suite of anthropological and zoological reliefs around its first-floor windows. As a recent city guide explains, the museum was constructed specifically to house the numerous natural treasures ‘found in or stolen from’ Germany’s many overseas colonies. Bremen wasn’t alone in accumulating such artefacts and its museum was one of many erected across Europe and America as countries competed for the best displays of cultural plunder.
In 1907, after a year of military service, Duncker married Elsa Zwernsmann in Dessau, where they had been childhood sweethearts, and brought her with him back to Bremen. He then changed schools, moving to the Realschule am Doventor. In August the next year their first daughter, Marigrita – named after Duncker’s mother – was born. In 1909 he changed schools again, moving to the Realgymnasium, an imposing boys’ school on Hermann-Böse Strasse where he remained as a teacher of maths, physics and biology for the rest of his career. Keeping a pachydermal eye on the school from the other side of the road was an eccentric reminder of Germany’s colonial ambitions: a life-size sculpture of a Namibian elephant made entirely from red bricks.
During his spare time in the years immediately before the Great War, Duncker produced a series of illustrated biology textbooks for schoolteachers. He also continued to pursue his fascination with birds and, using information from Göttingen’s libraries and specimens from Bremen’s museum, he explored the links between the geographical range and evolutionary history of different species. This was an ambitious project, but one that never came to much, and when it was published in 1912 Duncker was probably frustrated by its lack of clear conclusions. He was hungry for intellectual stimulation and longed for something that would engage his active brain, something novel, but something eminently doable. Before he could find anything the Great War intervened and any thoughts of studying birds or anything else were pushed to the back of his mind. Duncker was thirty-three. The family, which now included six-year-old daughter Marigrita, had just moved into a smart three-storey terrace house with an arched doorway and decorated roof in the south-east corner of town close to the Weser river. They lived in this house for the next thirteen years and it was here that their second child, Hans-Eberhard, was born and died less than one year later, and where their second daughter, Lotti, was born in August 1915. Serving as an officer on both the eastern and western fronts, Duncker gave a good account of himself, despite being slightly wounded; he was awarded several medals, including the Iron Cross. Four years later, with peace restored, Duncker settled back into his routine at the Realgymnasium. More worldly wise and picking up the pieces where he had left off, he continued as a conscientious, enthusiastic and innovative teacher, highly valued by both pupils and colleagues alike. This was a time for taking stock and Duncker looked at what had happened in biology elsewhere in the world while Germany and Britain had been preoccupied by a bloody, muddy war. Despite his commitment, teaching wasn’t enough to occupy his active mind and he started to look again for an extra-curricular project, but it would be another three years before Reich’s nightingale-canary caught his imagination.24