Media & Outreach

Informing, connecting, inspiring

For over a century, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior has made a discipline of nurturing people’s inborn fascination with animals in the natural world.

It started with our ancestor Institute, the Vogelwarte Rossitten, founded in 1901. An early adopter of the citizen science movement, it was actively crowdsourcing volunteers from the local community to help with the labor-intensive bird-ringing studies.

In time, higher ideals were encoded into our DNA.

Today, our center for communication and exchange, MaxCine, draws school students out of the confines of the classroom and into the cross section of science, art, and education. Our culture projects venture beyond pure science to the meeting place of scientific and artistic thought. Meanwhile, our cherished tradition of volunteer bird ringing has been ushered into the digital age with a range of citizen science apps that empower people with a smartphone to take part in research from anywhere in the world.