Photo above: Koepcke's Hermit (Phaethornis koepckeae) found only in Peru.
Date 9 November 2012
Source: Jay Warburton
Wiki: Creative Commons license

Maria Koepcke (1924-1971)
by Van Remsen

To be dishonored by the American Ornithological Society:

Maria Koepcke (1924-1971), of Koepcke’s Hermit and Koepcke’s Screech-Owl. This one is particularly sad for me because if not for her untimely death in 1971, I would have certainly gotten to meet her … and likely talked Furnariidae endlessly. Perhaps we could have co-authored the HBW chapter on Furnariidae. My friend John O’Neill got to know her, and I suspect there would have plenty of LSUMNS-Koepcke collaborations.

Maria Koepcke was the founder of modern Peruvian ornithology. Born in Germany, she received her Ph.D. from Kiel University in 1949 when she was only 25, and immediately moved to Peru with her husband Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke to devote herself to the study of that country’s avifauna. They lived in Lima and at their home set up an informal launching pad, Casa Humboldt, for biologists visiting Peru, which then included ornithologists John Terborgh, John O’Neill, and François Vuilleumier, and mammologist Oliver Pearson. Koepcke did considerable fieldwork in western Peru, from the coast to the high Andes. She became head of the Bird and Mammal section of the Museo de Historia Natural “Javier Prado'' at the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, to which she contributed 1500 bird specimens from her fieldwork, including the type specimens of 3 species and 11 subspecies that were new to Western science. The most famous of her new species, the White-cheeked Cotinga, was so distinctive that it was placed in its own, new genus, Zaratornis, named after the Bosque de Zárate, the type locality. Koepcke pioneered the effort to set aside as a reserve this pocket of semi-humid Polylepis forest on the western slope of the Andes; Zona Reservada Bosque de Zárate is an important area for several range-restricted and patchily distributed species.

Koepcke’s major project was an elevational transect through the western Andes to characterize avian elevational distributions and to determine why species were restricted to certain elevations from studying their ecology and habitat preferences; her 119-page monograph on the transect was one of the first publications of its kind. Koepcke is perhaps best known for her 1964 book “Las Aves del Departamento de Lima” (translated into English in 1970), one of the first field guides to birds anywhere in South America. Also, a talented artist, she illustrated that book, as well as bird portraits for Peruvian postage stamps.

The Koepckes decided that to really understand the avifauna of Peru, they needed to move to the Amazon, which they did in 1967; they established a research station, Panguana, near the Río Pachitea and the Sira Mountains; it is now a private biological research station in primary Amazon Forest.

Maria Koepcke was killed in 1971 when she was only 47. The airliner in which she was flying to Pucallpa was struck by lightning, fell from 10,000 ft, and crashed in remote terrain. The only survivor among the 90 passengers was Koepcke’s 17-year-old daughter Juliane, who hiked for 11 days to safety – see below. When the crash site was finally reached, it was determined that Maria survived the crash but died a few days later from her injuries. The IX Neotropical Ornithological Congress and the VIII Peruvian Congress were dedicated to her.

Obituary in the Auk.