Below is the foreword to the book “Studies in Animal Behavior” by Lilli Koenig, 1958, written by Konrad Lorenz

In order to appreciate this book and to understand its author fully, I think the reader should know something about the environment in which she wrote it. Where the Danube bends southward around the Wienerwald, the idyllic hills which constitute the north-easterly end of the Alpine chain, on a densely wooded slope, quite near to Vienna and yet in a primaeval wilderness hardly touched by civilization, there lies a unique little research station, dedicated to the investigation of the biology and particularly the behaviour of wild animals.

It was founded, immediately after the last war, by Otto Koenig the author's husband. Even as a very young man he had acquired fame as a wild-life photographer and had become, self-taught, a highly qualified scientific investigator of animal behaviour. I had come to know and to admire him in his own wild habitat, the reed forests of that western-most of Asiatic steppe-lakes, the Neusiedler-See, which lies only a few miles east of Vienna and which yet is as strange and mysterious as if it were lying in the midst of the Far East. Great white herons, spoonbills, glossy ibis and many other birds still nest there in the reeds; avocets, stilts and other rare waders live on the reedless eastern shores in large numbers, feeding on huge masses of Crustacea which, like the birds, are found nowhere else in Central Europe. It was the enchantment of these surroundings that made Otto Koenig first a photographer, then an observer and finally, inevitably, a scientist.

After having been caught up in the last world war, he came home possessing no worldly goods except an old Leica camera and a number of miraculously saved negatives, taken in the Mediterranean countries into which the war had cast him. His young wife Lilli, in turn, possessed a bunch of letters he had written her from these countries. Also she possessed a wonderful gift for drawing all things alive in a manner which, though certainly not naturalistic, somehow expresses their real nature in that inimitable way achieved by some of the best Chinese and Japanese painters. Lilli and Otto then proceeded to pool these possessions to make a book, Letters from the South, a most amazing picture book in which written words, highly artistic photographs and Lilli's drawings blend into the most vivid, poetical and still scientifically correct presentation of the tideless Mediterranean sea, its shores and their inhabitants.

This book earned the success it merited and the Koenigs found themselves, almost unexpectedly, in possession of some money. König is the German word for king and the two of them proved their right to that name by doing a truly kingly thing by dedicating all that money to the foundation of a little institute in which to study animals and their behaviour. They recruited a number of similarly minded young biologists for co-workers and then this crazy crew of young people simply took over a number of huts which had been built and later deserted by an anti-aircraft battery. They re-built the huts, constructed aviaries, dammed up a dry pond, caught, reared and bought a large number of highly interesting birds and animals, started research work and published a little periodical Die Umwelt, all in one breath, long before the authorities realized that they really had no legal rights to the buildings and the grounds where they were working. In any other civilized country they would very probably have been thrown out on their ears in almost no time. Not so in Happy Old Vienna. Sensible town fathers realized the enthusiasm and idealism behind these young people's rather irregular way of proceeding and the biological station became a publicly recognized establishment. True, hard times were still to come and almost unsurmountable obstacles stood in their path, but where there is a will, there is a way. The value of the scientific publications coming from the Wilhelminenberg found international appreciation, the services rendered by the Koenigs to public education through their popular lectures in the Vienna "Urania" could not be overlooked, and last but not least the immense popularity which the Biologische Station acquired with the Viennese have ensured its permanent existence. Still, Otto and Lilli Koenig are permanently overworked, finding only few hours of sleep, what with writing books and giving lectures in order to acquire funds, rearing animals and birds that require constant attention, keeping records of their behaviour and publishing excellent papers on these observations and experiments. It is a miracle that they are able to do all this, but the results are unquestionable.

If an excess of very hard work is compatible with the conception of a paradise, the Wilhelminenberg is one, at least for the animals that are being studied there. In the dense forest of oak and beech the modest wooden huts almost disappear and birds and mammals roaming free all over the place are more in evidence than humans. Tame antelopes can be seen chasing fierce dogs which, in turn, chivvy visitors. Herons of many species, Otto Koenig's most important subject, sit on the trees, so that it is quite dangerous to pass under them. Ducks, parrots and other birds fly about in numbers and inside some specially adapted huts, tropical animals and fishes are kept and bred under excellent conditions. Nowhere else have the charming little long-eared desert fox or that wonderful bird, the bee-eater ever been bred successfully, nowhere else the wonderful symbiosis of coral fishes and sea anemones can be observed with equal ease and thoroughness. In no other institution, to the best of my knowledge, has the elephant-shrew, Macroscelides typicus L., been kept for five years.

Such, then, is the environment in which this book has been written. Infinite capacity for observing animals, infinite patience in finding out their requirements and, simultaneously, the acutest analytical insight into the physiological and psychological laws governing their behaviour have gone into the writing. The initiated can feel, at every word, that it is the same author speaking, who wrote those profound and thoroughly exact ethological studies on the greater dormouse and on the European bee-eater which have established her reputation as a scientist. Yet every man, woman or child reading the book will feel its appeal in quite another way. The love of living creatures, the pure enjoyment of their beauty which have inspired Lilli Koenig’s work, her exact observations as well as her artistic sketches, must be intelligible to everyone not deaf or blind to the wonders of nature.