Victor R. Dolnik, 1938–2013

Abstract

Victor R. Dolnik was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the AOU in 1970 and an Honorary Fellow in 1977. He was born in 1938 in Sverdlovsk, USSR (now Yekaterinburg, Russia), into a family of engineers and passed away after a long illness on November 4, 2013, at his home in St. Petersburg. After graduating from high school in 1955, Victor sought and gained admittance to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) University, not Moscow University. He had good reason to do so. Biology in the USSR was still strongly influenced by the pseudoscientific spirit of Trofim Lysenko’s teachings, and the faculty of biology of Leningrad University was then the only place in the Soviet Union where genetics was taught by true scientists who asked their students at the first lecture to forget everything they had been told in high school about biology. Dolnik started his research career in 1960 in a quiet corner of the former East Prussia, on the nearly unpopulated Courish (Curonian) Spit on the Baltic coast, in Rybachy (formerly Rossitten), where the world’s first bird observatory, Vogelwarte Rossitten, had been active in 1901–1944. In that migration hotspot, Johannes Thienemann started the world’s first large-scale bird-banding project, which made that place famous before World War II. Vogelwarte Rossitten was resuscitated in 1956 by Prof. Lev Belopolsky as the Biological Station Rybachy (because it included not just ornithologists but also marine biologists and parasitologists) of the Zoological Institute in Leningrad. A team of young biologists from Leningrad, Moscow, Estonia, and Latvia worked on the Courish Spit. Dolnik was distinctive among his colleagues for his ability and his clear vision of future research. So it was no wonder that he soon became a valuable deputy of Lev Belopolsky. When the latter accepted an invitation to become a professor at Kaliningrad University, Dolnik was appointed the Biological Station’s director in 1967, at the age of 29. The first mission of the Biological Station was organization of mass standardized trapping and banding of birds, mainly passerines, that migrate over the Courish Spit in huge numbers. This has been done in large stationary funnel traps, the so-called Rybachy-type traps, that are modeled on Heligoland traps but, unlike them, allow capture of birds in active migratory flight up to 12 m above ground. This type of funnel trap quickly became popular in the former Soviet Union and, later, beyond it. The traps allowed the Rybachy to become the top banding site in the USSR. The reporting rate of bands was relatively high even in songbirds, because many of them migrated through the densely populated countries of Western Europe. It made it possible to publish the Atlas of Bird Migration on the Courish Spit in 1971 (an English translation was published in the United States in 1973). At the time, the main objective of mass banding was obtaining long-distance recoveries. However, later it appeared equally important that right from the start, the trapping project had been standardized by timing, trapping effort, and handling and measuring techniques, which made it possible to use the data for the analysis of longterm dynamics of avian numbers and timing of migration. In the 1960s, the topic of global climate change and its