Konrad Lorenz, born in Vienna in 1903, studied medicine and biology and is one of the founders of a new science, ethology, the study of animal behavior. After his retirement from the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Bavaria, which he headed from 1961 to 1973, the Max Planck Society created for him a Research Station in Grunau, Upper Austria, to which he moved his colony of greylag geese to continue studying them. Together with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973, in honor of his pioneering work.

"This is not a scientific book...It grew out of the pleasure I take in my observation of living animals."

Konrad Lorenz is often referred to as "father of the greylag geese." He has devoted a lifetime to their study, Sharing their lives at close quarters, he has truly entered their skins, and in the process has created one of the most vivid, beguiling, and entertaining documents to have emerged from ethology, the science of which he is cofounder.