serves on Darss, a Pomeranian peninsula, and at Rominten in
East Prussia. His proudest achievement was the Schorf Heath,
on Berlin’s doorstep. It was here, on June , , that he had
inaugurated his new bison sanctuary oblivious of the snickers
of the Berlin diplomatic corps with two pure bulls and seven
hybrid cows. He introduced elk as well. Successions of Prussian
kings had tried and failed to restore this noble, ungainly beast to
the Schorf Heath; he consulted zoologists, foresters, biologists
and interestingly experts on artificial insemination, and
succeeded, though not without experiencing his own initial dis-
appointments. Neither Swedish elk nor Canadian moose pros-
pered, so he had finally brought in elk calves from East Prussia:
seventeen in the fall of , ten a year later, and eleven in .
His first native elks would calve in the Schorf Heath sanctuary
in May , by which time he had also reared forty-seven local
bison.
The whole Schorf Heath experiment worked. From its
Werbellin Lake Game Research Laboratory he reintroduced the
rarer fauna into the heath, like night owl, wood grouse, heath-
cock, gray goose, raven, beaver, and otter. During , ,
townsfolk forked out pfennigs apiece to tour the wildlife
sanctuary. It became a forerunner of the great national parks in
other countries.
“For us,” he would tell huntsmen assembled for their
Saint-Hubert’s Day festival that November, “the forest is God’s
cathedral.”
There were those who found the rifle and the huntsman’s
knife an incongruous way of serving the Creator. But there was
a scientific logic in what Göring called “conservation by rifle.”
Game populations had to be culled to avoid starvation or epi-
demics, and he and his fraternity pursued this pseudoreligious
duty with grisly relish and high ritual.