page_title: Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild
section_title: Zoological career
hierarchical_section_title: Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild / Zoological career
caption_attribution_description: Walter Rothschild on Rotumah, a Galapagos tortoise that he found living in the grounds of an Australian lunatic asylum
context_page_description: Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Baron de Rothschild FRS, was a British banker, politician, zoologist and scion of the Rothschild family. As a prominent Zionist leader, he was presented with the famous Balfour Declaration which pledged to a Jewish national home in Palestine. Rothschild was the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1925 to 1926.
context_section_description: Rothschild studied zoology at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Meeting Albert Günther sparked his interest in the taxonomy of birds and butterflies.
  Although Rothschild himself travelled and collected in Europe and North Africa for many years, his work and health concerns limited his range and beginning while at Cambridge he employed others (explorers, professional collectors and residents) to collect for him in remote and little-known parts of the world. He also hired taxidermists, a librarian and, most importantly, professional scientists to work with him to curate and write up the resulting collections: Ernst Hartert, for birds, from 1892 until his retirement at the age of 70 in 1930 and Karl Jordan for entomology, from 1893 until Rothschild's death in 1937.
  At its largest, Rothschild's collection included 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds' eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies and 30,000 beetles as well as thousands of specimens of mammals, reptiles and fishes. They formed the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual.
  The Rothschild giraffe (Giraffa camelopardis rothschildi), a subspecies with five ossicones instead of two, was named after him. Another 153 insects, 58 birds, 17 mammals, three fish, three spiders, two reptiles, one millipede and one worm also carry his name.
  Rothschild opened his private museum in 1892. It housed one of the largest natural history collections in the world and was open to the public. In 1932, he was forced to sell the vast majority of his bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History after he had been blackmailed by a former mistress. On his death in 1937, the museum and all of its contents were given in his will to the British Museum (of which the Natural History Museum, London was then a part), the greatest accession that the institution has ever received. The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring is now a division of the Natural History Museum.
  Following a visit to Hungary in 1902, Rothschild brought six live edible dormice (Glis glis) back to Tring. Some of them escaped and started breeding successfully in the wild. They have now become a localised pest over an area of approximately 200 square miles in a triangle between Luton, Aylesbury and Beaconsfield, and there are estimated to be at least 10,000 of them. Even though considered an invasive species, they are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
  Rothschild was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Giessen in 1898, was elected a Trustee of the British Museum in 1899 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1911.
caption: Lord Rothschild on a giant tortoise
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