Nikolaas tinbergen theory
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Calling Nikolaas Tinbergen an animal behaviorist is a little like calling the Grand Canyon a little hole in the ground. Tinbergen, along with his colleague Konrad Lorenz, established the modern field of animal ethology, now an essential element of ecology and conservation.
Niko Tinbergen was born in The Hague, Netherlands, on April 15, 1907 (died 1988). The son of two school teachers, he would have been expected to be an academically talented student himself. But that wasn’t the case. “I was not much interest in school,” he wrote in his Nobel Prize biography. “…Wise teachers allowed me plenty of freedom to engage in my hobbies of camping, bird watching, skating and games….”
Nature was Tinbergen’s muse. He spent his free time observing birds, insects and fish. He tended aquariums in his backyard and school room, noting the next building and guarding behavior of sticklebacks. He watched Herring Gulls along the shore, and carefully observed the comings and goings of solitary wasps on the beach. He took careful notes and drew illustrations of what he saw.
His immersion in
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Nikolaas Tinbergen FRS
Dutch-born Nikolaas (Niko) Tinbergen grew from a boy who loved skipping school to be outdoors, into a Nobel Prize-winning founding father of ethology – the science of animal behaviour. In the prime of his career, Niko’s energy and rigour outweighed his worsening depression, to produce many influential contributions to the field.
Reluctant student
Born in 1907 in the Netherlands, Niko Tinbergen was an unremarkable pupil at school, doing just enough to pass exams. In an autobiography he writes:
‘I have considered school…rather a nuisance and…a frustrating restriction of my freedom. The sheer boredom of having to learn the multiplication tables…’
Yet his boyhood teachers would have seen a different side to Niko while he played truant in his preferred ‘classroom’ among the sand dunes and countryside that surrounded his home in the Hague. From five or six years old, Niko loved nothing more than being outdoors, watching and wondering about the animals he encountered - as his autobiography continues:
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Niko Tinbergen
ethology - animal behaviour
As a boy he took a great interest in two small freshwater aquaria located in the backyard of the family home and was also made responsible, by one of his teachers at High School, for three saltwater aquaria. Alongside these practical involvements he also appreciatively read the works of two famous Dutch naturalists - E. Heimans and Jac P. Thijsse.
He was initially rather daunted by any prospect of studying academic biology at university level but, through the influence of friends who took him to wild coastal places full of migratory wildfowl, his interest was reinvigorated such that he resolved to attempt studies in Biology at Leiden University. Here he again seemed to be relatively unremakable
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