STEJNEGER, LEONHARD HESS

(b Bergen, Norway, 30 October 1851; d Washington, District of Columbia, 28 February 1943)

ornithology, herpetology.

Having left his native country, his father’s mercantile business, and his first wife in 1881, Stejneger moved to the United States to seek employment to study his favorite subject, birds. (In 1880 the once prosperous business of his father, Peter Stamer Steineger, had gone into bankruptcy.) At the urging of his mother, Ingeborg Catharina Hess Steineger. Leonhard had aimed toward a medical career but graduated in law (1875) at the University of Kristiania (Oslo). He had long been interested in birds, and first published a work on them when he was nineteen; he also corresponded with ornithologists throughout the world.

After arriving in the United States, Stejneger went directly to Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution and was promptly hired to work under the curator of birds, Robert Ridgway. To fill the vacancy left by H. C. Yarrow, Stejneger was appointed acting curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Smithsonian in 1889 and ten years later became curator. From 1911 until his death, he was curator of the department of biology. (He was exempted from retirement by presidential order.)

Stejneger became a citizen of the United States in 1887, and in 1892 he married Helene Maria Reiners. In addition to becoming an honorary member of many scientific societies, Stejneger was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1923), received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Oslo, and was elected honorary president for life of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (1931). He was also made a commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav (1939), a member of the International Committee on Zoological Nomenclature (1898), and a member of the Permanent Committee of One Hundred of the International Ornithological Congresses (1905). An accomplished linguist, his skills proved useful at the many international meetings to which he was sent.

Stejneger began his extensive collecting in 1882 with a trip to the Komandorskiya Ostrova Islands to help set up weather stations for the United States Signal Service; there, he also gathered bones of the extinct Pallas’s cormorant. He returned to these islands during the period 1895–1897 for the International Fur-Seal Commission. Stejneger collected specimens in the American Southwest, in the South Dakota Badlands, in Puerto Rico, and, on a number of trips to Europe for scientific meetings, he collected specimens and made detailed studies of life zones of the Alps.

Stejneger produced a number of descriptive and classificatory publications on birds; but his curatorial appointment turned his interests to reptiles and amphibians, so that he became an expert on the systematics of those groups. With Thomas Barbour, he completed five editions of the highly useful check-list of North American Amphibians and Reptiles (Cambridge, Mass., 1917).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Stejneger’s 400 publications are almost equally divided between ornithology and herpetology, but include other subjects as well, for example, a meticulously researched biography of the first Arctic naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), and significant publications on fur seals. In 1885 he published “Results of Ornithological Explorations in the Commander Islands and in Kamtschatka,” in Bulletin. United States National Museum, 29 (1885), 1–382. He contributed extensively to John S. Kingsley, ed., Natural History of Birds (Boston, 1885).

In addition to the fifth ed. of Stejneger’s Cheklist,, which was in Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, 93 (1943), 1–260, “Poisonous Snakes of North America,” in Report of the United States National Museum for 1893 (1895), 337–487, is a classic in herpetology. Regional studies of birds and of reptiles and amphibians are listed in the full bibliography accompanying Wetmore’s biography of Stejneger (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. Alexander Wetmore wrote an account of Stejneger’s life, background, and scientific contributions in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 24 (1945–1947), 143–195, with complete bibliography. A shorter appreciation, with no bibliography, was written by Waldo L. Schmitt, in Systematic Zoology, 13 , no. 4 (1964), 243–249. An account of Stejneger’s accomplishments and personality, by A. K. Fisher, appeared in a tribute issue of Copeia, (Oct. 1931), 75–83.

Elizabeth Noble Shor