Kaltenburg

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LUDWIG KALTENBURG IS always waiting for the jackdaws to return, right up to his death in February 1989. Even in his last winter, he confidently tells visitors that one day a pair of the white-eyed corvids which he loves, which he admires, will choose his study chimney for their nesting site and found a new colony of jackdaws with their brood. “I know they won’t start building their nest for a few months yet,” he tells his guests, disciples, or journalists who have driven for nearly an hour from Vienna through the snowy landscape of Lower Austria. The future is clear to him, he says. Wrapped in a woolen rug, the great zoologist Ludwig Kaltenburg sits at the window, plaid pattern, full white hair. His hearing is very poor, but his mind has lost none of its sharpness.

“Birds shy away from smoke,” he says, and that’s why he’s against keeping the small stove in his little annex burning all day long: electric heaters frame the late-period Kaltenburg. His mood is relaxed. “I’m fully aware that the young jackdaws will have to manage without me.”

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