Honorary Member 2026
Prof. Dr. Roswitha Wiltschko
In recognition of her internationally groundbreaking research on magnetoreception and the orientation behavior of birds, as well as her outstanding lifelong contribution to ornithology.
Citation
The German Ornithological Society awards Prof. Dr. Roswitha Wiltschko honorary membership, thereby recognizing her outstanding, internationally pioneering research on the orientation behavior of birds, as well as her impressive work spanning more than five decades, through which she has decisively shaped ornithology both nationally and internationally.
Awarding of honorary membership 2026 to Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wiltschko (center left) and Prof. Dr. Roswitha Wiltschko (center right) by DOG President Dr. Dorit Visbeck-Liebers (right) and Prof. Dr. Heiko Schmaljohann (left), laudator and 1st Vice President of DOG.
Our knowledge that migratory birds use a “magnetic compass” to reach their migration destinations is owed in large part to the Wiltschkos, who developed their Frankfurt research group into one of the world’s leading centers for orientation biology. There, for the first time anywhere in the world, it was experimentally demonstrated that birds can use the Earth’s magnetic field for orientation. In robins, they showed that restless birds in cages aligned themselves along their species-specific seasonal migratory direction and that this direction rotated along with the artificial displacement of the magnetic field by Helmholtz coils. This discovery was initially met with skepticism in the scientific community, but today it is regarded as one of the foundations of modern orientation research and as one of the most important breakthroughs in behavioral biology of the 20th century.
Their joint research work, consistently pursued over more than five decades, is internationally highly regarded and unique in its continuity. The Wiltschkos investigated how migratory birds and homing pigeons coordinate different compass mechanisms and how these systems interact. In doing so, they not only placed the magnetic sense at the center of their work, but also sought to understand comprehensively how birds reach their migration destinations. This led to fundamental studies on the inheritance of migratory direction, on the homing ability of racing pigeons, as well as on the significance of site experience, infrasound, and olfactory information for navigation. Their research and review articles on the orientation system of birds continue to shape generations of ornithologists. In exemplary fashion, they combined extensive field research with precise laboratory work.
The Wiltschkos are not only regarded as pioneers in the study of the magnetic compass and compass systems in birds, but, in collaboration with highly renowned colleagues both nationally and internationally, they also carried out pioneering work on the physiological and neurobiological foundations of the magnetic sense, which to this day is certainly among the most exciting and at the same time most enigmatic questions in sensory physiology.
The scientific achievements of Roswitha and Wolfgang Wiltschko are far more than a series of brilliant individual discoveries. They helped establish and decisively shape an entire field of research over decades: the study of bird orientation as an independent, interdisciplinary discipline at the intersection of behavioral biology, sensory physiology, and physics. Their curiosity, methodological rigor, and persistence in the face of initial skepticism are exemplary for subsequent generations of researchers. They are indeed “a biological original of a very rare kind.”
We warmly congratulate Roswitha Wiltschko on an extraordinary scientific life’s work and thank her for everything she has given ornithology – and all of us who look with fascination at the routes of migratory birds – and thus also the German Ornithological Society, and what she has bestowed upon it forever.
Mainz, 17 September 2026
Dr. Dorit Visbeck-Liebers
President
Prof. Dr. Heiko Schmaljohann
Vice President
