RYBACHY, KALININGRAD OBLAST, RUSSIA

The biological station Rybachy is part of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. It employs 10 biologists and 12 administrative and technical staff, and hosts undergraduate and postgraduate students from various universities who carry out research and studies for their theses.

The station is located in a two-storey building in Rybachy, where it has facilities for breeding experimental birds and experimental work. Their digitised database contains information on sex, age, biometric data and hatching status of more than 3 million individual birds of 200 species. Between 30,000 and 40,000 new records are added to the database every year.

Eleven kilometres south-west of Rybachy and 23 kilometres from the foothills of the Curonian Spit is the Fringilla field station, which has been in operation since 1957. It now operates two large Rybachy-type traps for the capture of transient migrant birds.