BOOK REVIEWS



135



His second wife was shot in the head and died in 1928. He was the

only eyewitness to the event and in the absence of compelling evidence

to the contrary, the death was ruled an accident. Others though are not so

sure. One theory is that his wife, an accomplished ornithologist, who had

accompanied him during a birding trip to south Asia in 1925 and 1926, may

have been shot by him, when she threatened to expose the fact that many

of the rare birds he claimed to have collected during that trip, an account

of which he published in Ibis , were in fact not his own, but had been stolen

from other collections.


As far back as 1919, he had been caught stealing bird skins from the

British Museum (Natural History) and had been banned from the Bird Room,

but was allowed back after Lord Rothschild intervened on his behalf, even

though he, too, is said to have suspected Meinertzhagen of stealing birds

from him. It has been suggested that individuals at the museum may have

been afraid of accusing him of stealing, fearing that his collection, said to

have been the finest private collection of birds in existence, might go to the

USA, as Lord Rothschild’s collection had. Meinertzhagen had threatened

to bequeath his collection to the American Museum of Natural History,

but eventually donated his 20,000 or so bird skins to the British Museum

(Natural History), together with nearly 600,000 specimens of Mallophaga

(bird lice), fleas, flies and mites.


Many years later, when investigating the taxonomy of redpolls, Dr Alan

Knox discovered that specimens Meinertzhagen claimed to have shot at the

same time had been stuffed using totally different techniques. He was able

to show that some of Meinertzhagen’s skins had come from other collections

and had been relabelled with fictitious data. Hundreds of his other skins

were X-rayed and fibres from specimens of forest owlets were sent to an

FBI laboratory for analysis, enabling it to be shown that all 14 of his unique

records for species and subspecies collected on the Indian subcontinent, and

many more rare birds in his collection, had also been stolen and fraudulently

relabelled. It has been suggested that 5,000 skins in his collection could

turn out to be fraudulent.


The Giant Forest Hog Hylochoerus meinertzhageni , the first example

of which was shot by him in Kenya in 1904, is obviously genuine, as is, it

seems, the Afghan Snowfinch Montifringilla theresa. The latter was named

for Theresa Clay, his cousin, who when she was still a teenager, helped look

after him and his three small children, following the death of his second wife,

and was his constant companion until his death in 1967.


It is a fascinating book of which his bird thefts and deceptions are just a

small part (one chapter). These are though surely destined to be the subjects

of further books and articles.



