Evgeni Pavlovich Spangenberg

Evgeni Pavlovich Spangenberg (25 February 1898 – 25 July 1968) was a Soviet ornithologist and the author of several popular natural history books.

Spangenberg was born in Andrianovka (in modern Chita Oblast) and because his father Pavel worked in the railways, there was much travel and he grew up in St Petersburg and then Akhtuba in the Lower Volga region where the rich steppe wildlife made him interested in birds and hunting.

He graduated from the Irkutsk Gymnasium and moved to Ukraine, working in the railway workshops in Zaporozhye before he joined the Red Army in 1919.

He went on several expeditions including to Central Asia, southern Kazakhstan and Lower Syr Darya where he studied bird life.

[1] Spangenberg suffered from poor health after the 1950s and produced five volumes of the Birds of the Soviet Union (1951) for which he was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1952.