Nikolaas Tinbergen, 15 April 1907 - 21 December 1988

Abstract

Nikolaas Tinbergen was born in 1907 in The Hague. There must have been something very special about his family, for it produced two Nobel Prize Winners (Niko, in Medicine and his eldest brother in Economics), the Director of Energy in The Hague, another zoologist, who died just as a potentially distinguished career was unfolding, and a sister who became, like the father, a grammar school teacher. Certainly there had been primary and secondary school teachers on both sides of the family, with his father a teacher of Dutch language and history and a scholar of mediaeval Dutch. Perhaps more important, the Tinbergens were a warm and happy family, where each child was given loving encouragement to follow his or her own bent, coupled with the modicum of discipline necessary for the happiness of the whole. Tinbergen (in his Notes for the Royal Society) described the context of his boyhood thus: Our family was the natural centre of a wide circle of friends with greatly varied interests. We had the example of hardworking parents, who managed, before the days of many scholarships, to give all of us a University education. There was a tradition of interest in the arts, in nature and in politics. All my brothers and I had from our father the inclination and a certain ability to draw and paint; during our many happy holidays in the country we would all carry our sketching pads and spend hours sketching. Regular visits to theatre, concerts and art galleries ... But Niko’s interest in nature, already apparent when he was five years old, did not come primarily from family members: they enjoyed the open air, but they were more concerned with the arts and social problems. In an autobiographical article (Tinbergen (1985) to which this memoir is much indebted) he ascribes his fascination with wildlife to the general interest in nature which had been growing in The Netherlands since the late 19th century. There were newspaper articles and popular books on animal life, and, appealing to the collector in every child, excellent reproductions of the paintings of natural history subjects by 19th century artists were given away in biscuit packets. Elsewhere (Notes) he has mentioned the importance to him of the writings of Jac. P. Thijsse and ‘the now forgotten American author William Long’