This stately female plays a key role for the sponsorship campaign.

A great friend of wet meadows

The Eurasian Curlew, the largest European wading bird, is unmistakably with its long, curved beak and long legs. So it is perfectly equipped to pick up food in the sandy, slimy mudflats.

To rear offspring it prefers wet open land: large river valleys, bogs and damp meadows. When choosing its nest site on the ground this shore bird is not easily satisfied: when it has chosen a place to breed, it returns always there, even if the landscape has evolved to its detriment and has changed from a damp meadow to barren farmland.

Increasingly the Curlew as attained scarcity value in the heavily re-shaped cultivated landscape, mainly due to the changes in land use, the drainage of many wetlands and the intensification of hayfields and pastures.

A total of ten animals are in the collections of the German Oceanographic Museum. This female with a stately height of 62 cm was selected for the sponsorship campaign of the supporters' association. In 1990, the exhibit crossed the German-German border: from the Schleswig-Holstein mudflats, it came to the Institute for Domestic Animal Science at Kiel and was transferred from there to Stralsund.