Elizabeth
V. Kozlova
37
years ago today, the famous Russian ornithologist Elizabeth V.
Kozlova died. She is well known for her outstanding work in
researching Mongolia’s bird fauna. To pay tribute to her an
obituary written by by A. I. Ivanov, published in the British
Ornithologists’ Union’s scientific journal, Ibis (1976,
vol. 118, issue 1, p.127) is repeated here.
OBITUARY
ELIZABETH V.
KOZLOVA
Madame
E. V. Kozlova, a corresponding member of the British Ornithologists’
Union, died in Leningrad on 10 February 1975. She was born in a
physician’s family on 19 August 1892 in the little town of
Krasnoe Selo, near Petersburg (now a part of Leningrad). Kozlova
started her ornithological activity as an amateur during a visit to
Tian Shan in 1913, and again in the southern Ukraine in 1918–19.
Later, in 1923, her husband P. K. Kozlov, the well-known explorer of
Central Asia, organized the Mongolian expedition of the Russian
Geographical Society, and Madame Kozlova participated in that
expedition as a professional ornithologist. She stayed in Mongolia
from 1923 until 1926, and was able to study birds in different parts
of the country: in the forests of the Western Kentei mountains, the
steppes of Central Mongolia, and the Gobi desert in the depression of
the Orog-Nur Lake and near the northern-slopes of the Gobian Altai.
Rich collections and observations brought from Mongolia provided
Kozlova with excellent material for a monograph, Birds
of Southwestern Transbaicalia, Northern Mongolia and Central Gobi.
The work was rewarded with a Silver medal of the Russian Geographical
Society. In 1929 and 1930 Kozlova visited Mongolia again, and studied
birds in the unexplored high mountainous parts of Khangai and in the
taiga region of Eastern Kentei. A condensed survey of her studies in
Mongolia was published in the Ibis,
and is well known to British ornithologists.
E. V. Kozlova 1923 in Mongolia,
left: in the mountains, right: in front of a yurt.
from: Piechocki, R. 1983. Abriß zur Erforschungsgeschichte der
left: in the mountains, right: in front of a yurt.
from: Piechocki, R. 1983. Abriß zur Erforschungsgeschichte der
Avifauna
mongolica. Erforsch. biol. Ress. MVR 3: 5–31.
From her
Mongolian expeditions until the last years of her life, Kozlova
worked in the Department of Birds of the Zoological Institute of the
Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. In the winter of 1934–35
and in 1937, together with the ornithologist A. Ya. Tugarinov, she
visited the wintering quarters of birds on the southwestern shores of
the Caspian Sea. Two books published on the results of these trips
are of great interest and value, since the study was done before the
level of the Caspian Sea was much lowered and the environment changed
to a high degree.
During World
War I1 the Zoological Institute was transferred from Leningrad to
Dushambe in Tadzhikistan. It was a rather hard time. Nevertheless
Kozlova successfully studied the biology of Phacianus colchicus
bianchii as well as the biology of some mountain birds. The
physical effort, however, was great and after coming back to
Leningrad in 1945 Kozlova was forced to refuse to participate in
further expeditions.
There were
two main trends in Kozlova’s activity in the post-war time. She
was closely involved with the preparation of the Fauna of the
U.S.S.R., and published monographs on the Gaviiformes,
Procellariiformes, Alcidae and Charadriidae of the U.S.S.R. The
excellent monograph on Charadriidae, published in two volumes in 1961
and 1962, is a fine synthesis of data obtained by methods of
comparative and functional morphology and by ecological observations.
Simultaneously,
she pursued studies on the genesis of the avifauna of Central Asia.
She started with Tibet, as the recognized centre of origin of
numerous high mountain birds. Although not very large, the work
Avifauna of Tibet, its relative ties and history, published by
Kozlova in 1952, is very important because of the methods used in it
for the study of the origin of complexes united in a fauna. The same
methods were used by Kozlova in her last work, completed not long
before her death, Birds of the zonal steppes and deserts of
Mongolia (in press*). Such was the contribution of Madame Kozlova
to our knowledge of birds.
A. I. IVANOV
*
published: Birds of
the steppe and desert zones of Central Asia.
Leningrad: Trudy
Zool. Inst. Akad. Nauk SSSR
59, in Russian.
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