Bird sanctuary at Wildmeisterdamm in Rudow

The bird sanctuary at Wildmeisterdamm in Rudow is a 3.75-hectare large landscape protection area in the Berlin district of Gropiusstadt, which belongs to the Neukölln district. It is also known as Bird Wood or Bird Protection Wood.
The forest was established in 1872 by game master Hugo Luther on behalf of Emperor Wilhelm I as a game enclosure. This allowed for up to 1,000 hares and 900 partridges to be hunted during the annual court hunts. Wilhelm I subsequently appointed Luther as the royal game master and renamed the former Buckower Chaussee in 1939 in his honor posthumously to Wildmeisterdamm. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, the significance as a hunting area diminished, as the population of wild animals decreased significantly due to the increasing settlement of the surrounding area. The hunt was ultimately discontinued with the ban for all of Berlin in 1945. Parallel to this development, the later director of the Neukölln Local History Museum, Wilhelm Schmidt, had been working since 1929 to designate the area as a bird sanctuary. This happened in 1934. In 1952, it was placed under landscape protection by the Berlin police president, Johannes Sturm.

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