Rossitten Bird Observatory

It was sited at Rossitten, East Prussia (now Rybachy, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia), on the Curonian Spit on the south-eastern coast of the Baltic Sea.

Thienemann first visited the fishing village of Rossitten there in 1896 where he experienced “a bird migration proceeding in a regular manner but more massive than had ever before been observed in Germany” and he “could not stop wondering whether something of permanent value might somehow be achieved here”.

Heinrich Himmler sought to use storks bred in the Rossiten observatory to distribute German propaganda in 1943, an idea that was rejected successfully by Ernst Schüz.

[4] Following Germany's loss of East Prussia at the end of the Second World War, the institutional inheritor of Rossitten's ornithological research program was the establishment by the Max Planck Society (the renamed Kaiser Wilhelm Society) of the “Vogelwarte Radolfzell”, with the staff from the Rossitten observatory, at the town of Radolfzell am Bodensee at the western end of Lake Constance in Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology.

The station was set up following a special decision of the Board of the Academy of Sciences with the aim of studying bird migration, and of reestablishing the research tradition started by German ornithologists, after the ten-year hiatus.