Claudia Bernadine Elisabeth Hartert

Claudia Bernadine Elisabeth Hartert (21 June 1863 – 24 August 1958) was a British/German ornithologist and illustrator. She was a British citizen born in the Kingdom of Prussia.

Biography Born Claudia Endris (or Endriss) (21 June 1863 in Coesfeld, Germany),

Work On 4 May 1892 Claudia Hartert and her husband left Le Havre, France, for an extended trip to the West Indies in the Caribbean Sea. On 19 May they reached the island of Saint Thomas, where Claudia saw her first hummingbird, a blue star Antilles.

Together with her husband she was the first to describe the blue-tailed Buffon hummingbird subspecies (Chalybura buffonii intermedia E. Hartert & C. Hartert, 1894). The article "On a collection of Humming Birds from Ecuador and Mexico" appears to be their only joint publication. In The Feathered World (Die Gefiederte Welt) she published many observations and illustrations from her trip to the West Indies.

In October 1882, the Hartert couple moved to Tring, England, to work with Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild. Ernst became the director of the Natural History Museum at Tring, which at the time was privately owned by Rothschild. Claudia managed the museum's library for at least a few years. The couple lived a normal life there despite their dual allegiances to Germany and England until the beginnings of World War I. While in Tring, Claudia's husband became a naturalized English citizen, according to an excerpt

Illustrations Claudia Hartert was acknowledged as an excellent illustrator, and provided 493 illustrations that appeared in A Practical Handbook of British Birds. Her figures went without attribution in the first edition that was printed before World War I. In the preface to the second volume Harry Forbes Witherby wrote:

I have also to acknowledge my gratitude to Mrs. Hartert for the care and trouble she has taken over the text figures, almost all of which have been drawn by her from specimens in the Tring Museum.

Some of the drawings also appear in the five-volume Handbook of British Birds, that Witherby published in 1952.

Later years Claudia Hartert retained her English citizenship after moving to Berlin in 1930. Heliangelus claudia E. Hartert, 1895 is today considered a synonym for the Longuemare's sunangel (Heliangelus clarisse (Longuemare, 1841)). The same illustration appeared in: The Feathered World. (9 March 1893). 12 (10): 91-95. Hartert, Claudia B. E. (1900). Pen and Ink Drawings of Palearctic Birds.