A German naturalist set up the world’s first ornithological station in what used to be East Prussia in 1901. Today, Russian scientists band hundreds of thousands of birds at the site. Tourism greatly helps to fund their work

A German naturalist set up the world’s first ornithological station in what used to be East Prussia in 1901. Today, Russian scientists band hundreds of thousands of birds at the site. Tourism greatly helps to fund their work
The trap should contain the first birds by now. It’s 8 a.m. and Professor Leonid Sokolov, 69, is striding through the pinewoods. The chirruping swells to a crescendo as the track reaches the dunes and a large construction made of fishing net, at its entrance, 15 meters high and 30 meters wide, and 70 meters long. Sokolov steps inside the funnel-shaped trap that narrows as it leads into a cage where some two dozen birds are fluttering about. “Chaffinches and robins,” he says. “They can fly 400 kilometers in a single night.” Circling, catlike, he plucks the birds from the walls and gently places them in a mesh box.
The birds are en route from their winter quarters in southern Europe to their breeding grounds in the Baltic region. This trap on the Curonian Spit, a peninsula in the Baltic Sea west of Lithuania and Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, lies right in their path, and the birds stop here to rest and feed on insects in preparation for the next stage of their journey. In 1901, when the area was part of East Prussia, the German ornithologist Johannes Thienemann set up the world’s first ornithological station in the coastal v