They’re everywhere today, run by government bodies, NGOs, and even individuals in search of a tax break. They staff hawk watches, monitor shorebird nests, and work with landowners and managers to preserve habitat. They do a lot of good work — almost always without a lot of money.
Bird observatories are so much a part of the modern birding landscape that we can easily forget they had to be invented. This is a great day to remember that fact — and to honor the founder of the first such institution in the world, Johannes Thienemann, born 150 years ago today in Thuringia.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Thienemann was living in Rossitten, then a village in East Prussia and now the Russian Rybachy. In October 1900, he was assigned a spot on the agenda at the Leipzig meeting of the German Ornithologists’ Society. His was the final paper in the Sunday morning session; in his remarks, he presented the plan for an ornithological observation station on the Curonian Spit, that long slender bit of sand now connecting Lithuania and Russia.
In mid-December, the Prussian Ministry for Religious, Education, and Religious Affairs issued a decree establishing the Vogelwarte Rossitten, to be run by the DO-G and the observatory’s first director, Johannes Thienemann.
Thienemann had set himself some ambitious goals. The new bird observatory was charged with maintaining thorough migration records, collecting life history information, investigating molt, monitoring crop depredations, undertaking habitat plantings, installing nest boxes, building feeding stations, and establishing a museum and library. Thienemann’s responsibilities would also include the publication of an annual report and occasional papers treating noteworthy observations and experiments; he was no doubt pleased by the assurance in the by-laws that
there are no restrictions placed on any other publication activity on the part of the Director so long as that activity does not interfere with the timely preparation of the official reports.
That must have come as a considerable relief to the new director as he wondered what to do with all his spare time.
Undaunted as only a young German can be, Thienemann set to work immediately, and the observatory was formally opened on January 1, 1901, with funding provided by the Royal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Province of East Prussia, and generous private patrons, among them Secretary of State von Moltke, not otherwise known as a birder.
In 1907, the East Prussian state constructed a building to house the observatory and its staff, which at that time comprised Thienemann and a servant; a local taxidermist, A. Möschler, stuffed and mounted the specimens collected as part of the observatory’s work.
From the earliest days of Rossitten, Thienemann was particularly interested in marking migratory birds in the effort to determine their routes and timing.
If the colors of birds of the same species living in scattered localities were so strikingly different that, for example, eastern German storks had red legs and western German storks yellow, south German ones had green and those from the Russian provinces blue and so on, then we would quickly make good progress in our studies of migration; every migratory bird would carry its own passport, and we would always be informed about the Where From and the Where To of the travelers. Well, nature isn’t that accommodating, but perhaps we can help….
By marking and numbering the birds in a systematic, well-organized way, researchers could “raise the individual above the common run of his conspecifics,” and use the marked birds to discover things about their migration routes, their winter ranges, their ages, the sequence of their plumages:
This would mean the end of hypothesizing and the beginning of factual knowledge.
Concerted banding began at Rossitten in 1903, with tantalizing results coming in almost immediately. Of the more than 900 Hooded Crows captured and ringed in the first seven years, fully 12% were recovered; one bird, marked in October 1903, was shot in May 1909 30 kilometers outside of St. Petersburg.
Black-headed Gulls and White Storks wandered even farther. One of the 40 foreign recoveries among the gulls came from Tunis, 2200 kilometers to the south, while stork bands were returned from Syria, Egypt, Palestine, the Sudan, Rhodesia, and what is now South Africa.
Thienemann died at Rossitten in 1938, nine years after his official entry into what was a very active retirement. The bird observatory remained open until 1944, and was reconstituted after the war as a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; since 1997, its operation in Ribachy has been funded largely by the German Heinz Sielmann Foundation.
Ask almost any English-speaking birder about the history of German ornithology, and the first word out of her mouth will be “Heligoland.” But it all started far to the east, and it’s all thanks to Johannes Thienemann.
