The Patient Naturalist

On either side of the Danube, in the Altenburg district of Lower Austria, there is a stretch of dense willow forests, impenetrable scrub, reed-grown marshes and drowsy backwaters. Red and roe deer, herons and cormorants hunt there. Muskrats come down from Bohemia, and heavy-bodied stags recall the days when Francis Joseph I imported wapiti from America for the royal hunt.

There, on a hot summer day, two naturalists were trying to photograph a flock of greylag geese, but some inquisitive little mallards kept getting in the way. The photographer was doing his best to call them off. "Rangangangang, rangangang-ang!" he screeched, to no effect. Then he realized his mistake. "Sorry," he said. "I mean--quahg, gegegegeg, quahg, gegege-geg!" In his irritation, he had been addressing the mallards in greylag language.

The cameraman was actually "talking" to the birds, according to Naturalist Konrad Z. Lorenz, the other member of the party, who claims: "I can do it myself." In a new book called King Solomon's Ring (Crowell; $3.50), Dr. Lorenz tells how he developed even greater intimacy than that with which King Solomon "spake also of beasts and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes."

Destructive Pets. Somehow Dr. Lorenz found time to study medicine, but he admits to having been a naturalist since his school days. His parents started it by putting up with destructive pets. Later his wife learned to live with cockatoos that ate the buttons off the week's wash, and geese that were never quite housebroken. These creatures had free run of the household while Dr. Lorenz studied them with infinite patience.

This avocation had its hazards. Once, while the naturalist was still a medical student, a pet capuchin monkey named Gloria became bored and romped through his study. She dragged a bronze lamp across the room and heaved it into an aquarium. Then she unlocked a bookcase, removed Volumes 2 and 4 of Strumpel's textbooks of medicine, tore them to shreds and stuffed them in the fish tank. Lorenz returned to find fuses blown, empty book covers on the floor, and his sea anemones tangled in torn paper.

"Gloria must have dedicated considerable time to her experiments," says the mild-mannered scientist. "Physically alone, this accomplishment was, for such a small animal, worthy of recognition . . ."

Cackle & Croak. With his affectionate patience, Dr. Lorenz has become familiar with the passions of that monogamous little fish, the cichlid. He knows the wild ecstasies of the Siamese fighting fish and the stickleback. He can spell out the intricate class consciousness of jackdaw society, for he has seen a low-ranking female mate with a high-ranking male and assume his place in the social order.

Often enough, unwary strangers have taken Dr. Lorenz for a fugitive from a psychiatric clinic when they have surprised him cackling and croaking with furious concentration. But he is only practicing his remarkably successful communication with birds.

Wolves & Doves. As a field surgeon in World War II, Dr. Lorenz watched the highest of the vertebrates practice mass mutilations on his own species. Among the lower orders, only such "gentle" animals as doves and hares, he says, are guilty of the same unfeeling cruelty. The wolf, a popular symbol of ferocious wickedness, is psychologically incapable of killing his most hated rival if the rival bares his neck in meek submission.

This, the observant naturalist points out, is the meaning of the Biblical admonition : " 'And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other.' Not so that your enemy may strike you again do you turn the other cheek . . . but to make him unable to do it." Naturalist Lorenz, drawing a moral, says that the day may come when mankind will be divided into two camps, each with the power of destroying the other. "Shall we then behave like doves or wolves? . . . We may well be apprehensive."

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