[ENVIRONMENT - 5 week old owl - situational photograph]. [1939]. Postcard photograph form. 14,6x10,...

[ENVIRONMENT - 5 week old barred owl - situational photograph]. [1939]. Postcard photograph form. 14.6x10.4 cm, by Włodzimierz Puchalski.
On the back the print: "Eared Owl (Asio otus) 5-week-old. Fot. Wł. Puchalski / 1939 [...] Original photograph". Local minor stains on the back, overall good condition.
W. Puchalski (1909-1979) - naturalist, hunter, photographer, director of nature films. Infected with a passion for photography from early childhood. At the age of fourteen he received his first camera from his grandfather Hieronim Sykora. He attended the XII State Gymnasium in Lviv, then the Cadet Corps No. 1. He did his military service at the artillery cadet school in Vladimir Volynskyi. In 1933 he began his studies at the Agricultural Academy in Dublany and finished them with a diploma in agronomy engineering. Between 1933 and 1936, he worked as an assistant to Prof. Witold Romer in the Department of Photochemistry of Polish Film Engineering. In 1937 he became an assistant to Prof. Kazimierz Wodzicki in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology of Animals at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. In 1936 he organized the first exhibition in Poland on nature and hunting. He became a well-known photographer and received many commissions for domestic and foreign magazines. Six times he won first place in photographic competitions organized by the editors of the "Polish Hunter". He took part in the September campaign as an artillery lieutenant. During the Second World War (1940-1944) he worked as a forester in the Brzóza estate (Tarnobrzeg district). He cooperated with the partisans in the Sandomierz Forest. After the war he settled in Cracow. In 1946 he organized the Cracow Film Institute. From 1949 he worked at the Institute of Zootechnics of the Jagiellonian University, creating a department of photo-film documentation. From 1956 until the end of his life he worked with the Educational Film Studio in Lodz. He took part in two expeditions to Spitsbergen (1957, 1958), while in 1978 he took part in an expedition organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences to Antarctica, during which he died while taking pictures on King George Island. Twice married, second wife Alan Gröo. Between 1947 and 1979 he made more than a dozen films and published dozens of books on nature. For his work he was awarded several times in Poland and abroad, and decorated, among others: Knight's Cross, Commander's Cross Polonia Restituta.