Jan Sztolcman

Biography

Sztolcman was born in Warsaw and went to the 3rd Gymnasium. At an early age he was influenced by the travel writings of Gustave Aymard, Thomas Mayne Reid and the fiction of Jules Verne. Beginning in 1872, Sztolcman studied zoology at the Imperial University of Warsaw. He worked on the cabinet of Władysław Taczanowski and from 1875 to 1882, he joined Konstanty Jelski to collect zoological specimens in South America, primarily in Peru, and from 1882 to 1884, he lived and worked in Ecuador. He collected several hundred species of birds from South America, with some of the specimens being little known or entirely unknown to European ornithologists. In 1884, he returned to Warsaw, where in 1887 he was appointed director of the newly founded Branicki zoological museum. He also held the position of professor of geology and paleontology. In 1899 he founded the periodical Łowiec Polski that he edited until his death. In 1901 he went to Sudan with Jozef Potocki. From 1924 he lectured on hunting at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences and at the Forestry school in Łowicz. At the International Congress for Nature Conservation in 1923 he proposed a Polish project to save the European bison which was based on the American Bison Society and its work.