On the trail of bird migration

Heligoland thrush soup, wood pigeon on green cabbage - today hardly anyone on Germany's only offshore island knows how to prepare such delicacies. But as late as the 19th century, the feathered guests resting on the red rocks were, above all, a welcome change on the islanders' menu.

According to legend, the physical well-being sometimes ranked before the salvation of the soul:on a spring Sunday, so it is said, the island pastor was preaching something uplifting when a murmur went through the church - the snipes were approaching. The shepherd is said to have hastily closed the Bible with the words:"De Snepp is coming! Amen", and the congregation rushed out to secure a Sunday roast with nets and shotguns.

From bird hunter to hobby ornithologist

The painter Heinrich Gätke, who settled on Helgoland in 1837, initially valued the abundance of birds on the island as a hunter and gourmet. Moved by the beauty of a shot hunting falcon, he took a closer look at the animals:in 1843 he started a collection of stuffed birds and four years later began to keep an ornithological diary. His early records of birds and weather form the foundation of today's scientific data collection.

The self-taught Gätke had already begun to publish in specialist journals and published the book "Die Vogelwarte Helgoland" in 1891 - but it would still be a few decades before an ornithological research station was officially founded.

A marine biologist comes up short

When the biologist Hugo Weigold, who had a doctorate, came to Helgoland to study marine life in 1909, he found the stuffed birds and Gätke's library at the Royal Prussian Biological Institute. The amateur ornithologist had sold his treasures to the marine research facility, which began work in 1892 when Great Britain had ceded the offshore island to Germany.

Bird fool Weigold was enthusiastic about the scientific fundus and was finally able to convince the head of the institute, Friedrich Heincke, to entrust him with "the execution of ornithological tasks" on April 1, 1910. Thus the "Heligoland Bird Observatory" was born - the second oldest in the world after the Rossitten ornithological station on the Curonian Spit.

Weigold becomes Lord of the Rings

Weigold set the course for systematic research into bird migration:Like his colleagues in Rossitten, East Prussia at the time, he began scientific bird ringing. The method is as simple as it is ingenious - the localities of marked birds allow conclusions to be drawn about migration movements. Among other things, information about the weight, age and cause of death of the feathered ring bearer is catalogued. The first animal registered on Heligoland was a song thrush with the ring number "1111".

In order to get a better hold of his research objects, Weigold next picked up the spade. On the treeless and bushless Heligoland Oberland he laid out a "Fanggarten":He greened a hollow, which the locals call "Sapskuhle" because of its many rain ponds. Between the bushes he caught the birds with nets. Since the procedure was rather stressful for humans and animals, the biologist constructed the later world-famous Heligoland funnel traps from 1920 onwards. With them, the tunnel-like nets gradually narrow until they end in a box. From there the birds are taken to the ringer's hut in linen bags.

Evacuated and bombed out

Bird research on Helgoland has been idle for a short time twice in the last hundred years. During the First World War, the island was evacuated, and Gätke's bird collection - packed in zinc boxes - was brought ashore and badly damaged in the process. World War II got worse. In 1944, the Royal Air Force destroyed the North Sea Museum with other parts of the Gätke collection, and on April 18, 1948, a thousand British bombers destroyed the island in two hours. Fortunately, the ornithological station had stored the most important material in two places deep in the rock.

Post-war years:The Helgoland ornithological station becomes the IfV

Immediately after the end of the war, Weigold's successor, Rudolf Drost, set up a makeshift temporary location in a stable building at the University of Göttingen. He safely recovered the irreplaceable ringing archive from the island - with the personal details of 1.2 million ringed birds and 40,000 rediscovered birds.

In the collapsed structures of defeated Germany, the former Prussian ornithological station had to reorganize itself - since 1946 it has been under the authority of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture as an independent "Institute for Bird Research (IfV)". The institute found a new home in Wilhelmshaven in 1947, where its headquarters are today. The ornithologists erected traps and aviaries for experimental birds on the tree-covered site of the former Fort Rüstersiel. The intact specimens from the bird collection also found a place in Wilhelmshaven:The "Gätke Cabinet" can be viewed in the Wadden Sea House of the National Park Center.

New beginning on Helgoland

But the work should also continue on Heligoland. In 1952 the British released the island - the following spring the IfV sent Wolfgang Jungfer to set up an "island station on Heligoland". It was a rebuild from scratch. The first thing to do was to restore the bombed Fanggarten.

When Gottfried Vauk took over the island station on April 1, 1956, Helgoland still looked "like a giant molehill of dirt". But the following year the new station building next to the Sapskuhle was finished and a new section with much better working conditions began.

Guardians of the North Sea

With its island station, the IfV has long since ceased to limit itself solely to bird migration research. Birds are subject to countless human influences - from disruptive recreational activities to hazardous materials and transportation to habitat destruction. While Hugo Weigold had already pointed out the importance of seabirds as bio-indicators in the 1920s, Gottfried Vauk, the "catcher of Heligoland", spoke to politicians and business representatives in particular.

The rough-and-ready scientist ran the island station for 32 years and warned about pollution of the seas long before the issue of environmental protection became a matter of general concern. He denounced the plight of oil-smeared seabirds and the floating "ghost nets" "forgotten" by fishermen in which hundreds of thousands of birds, as well as whales, dolphins and seals are snared and perish in agony every year.

Almost nine million birds ringed

Environmental research projects are increasingly important for the IfV. For example, the scientists consider the effects of wind turbines on bird migration or draw conclusions about climate change from the behavior of birds.

In addition to the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, the Institute for Bird Research "Vogelwarte Heligoland" is now one of half a dozen of the world's largest centers for basic ornithological research. According to IfV director Franz Bairlein, his long-term data on bird migration on Helgoland are unique:"Nowhere else has bird migration been studied in such a standardized way over such a long period of time."

In a hundred years, the IfV has ringed almost nine million birds from a total of 585 species, more than 800,000 of them on Heligoland alone. Between the Arctic Ocean and Namibia, between Iceland and the Siberian Permian, around 250,000 birds from 307 species were found again and reported back to the IfV.

Incidentally, Hugo Weigold was able to register the very first Helgoland rediscovery after only two days:it was song thrush "1111" - shot.