Mittelberg in Baden-Württemberg

The Mittelberg near Weil der Stadt was designated a nature reserve in 2000. Its primary purpose is to preserve and safeguard the typical, particularly high-quality hedgerow landscape with extensive, extensively used meadows, semi-arid grasslands, fringes, hedgerows, and stone bars for scientific, ecological, natural-historical, and cultural-historical reasons. Special floristic features include the plant species Minuartia hybrida and Orobanche alba, which are classified as critically endangered in Baden-Württemberg. The occurrence of the two butterfly species "Scarce Swallowtail " and " Glanville Fritillary " should also be highlighted.

Oliver Maier is a trained gardener. Having grown up in the DBV (The German Farmers’ Association, youth group leader), and later in NABU as 2nd and 1st chairman, he has been involved in a wide range of environmental issues since his youth. He has taken care of hedges and semi-arid grasslands, resettlement, and survy of European dippers, common kingfishers, barn owls, little owls, and swallows, worked in the AGW (working group for peregrine falcons), carried out various swift projects (100 nesting sites for swifts in Herrenberg) and established and built up one of the largest lapwing colonies in Bavaria.

The fascination of insects was always present, the breeding of the most diverse moths and their release were and are always special moments.

Martin Lohneis takes the soil and vegetation samples for DINA at the Mittelberg study site. In 2019 he also helped at the Ipf study site. He worked as a veterinarian and retired in spring 2020. His main interest now is the native insect fauna. He regularly reports his observations to the internet portal "naturgucker.de". As he speaks particularly for sustainable development, he recently became involved in the NABU committee for sustainability.

Comment on the work at DINA: "On 13 October 2019, a co-worker and I were checking the Malaise traps, at the same time we kept looking up into the sky for migrating birds and were able to marvel at and photograph several thousand migrating woodpigeons in the course of just under an hour. The location of the traps is on a well-known migratory bird corridor and is always worth a visit in autumn." (O. Maier)