At an early age he was influenced by the travel writings of Gustave Aymard, Thomas Mayne Reid and the fiction of Jules Verne.

He collected several hundred species of birds from South America, with some of the specimens being little known or entirely unknown to European ornithologists.

In 1884, he returned to Warsaw, where in 1887 he was appointed director of the newly founded Branicki zoological museum.

[2][3] Sztolcman described a number of bird taxa but many other specimens he collected in other groups were named by specialists in his honour with the specific epithet of stolzmanni.

[2] Among Sztolcman's written works is a 1926 treatise on the European bison, titled Żubr, jego historia, obyczaje i przyszłość (The wisent, its history, behavior and future).