In the mid-1970s, I joined the first cohort of students studying biology at the newly founded university in Bielefeld. In those days there were only about 30 to 40 of us students and about three professors, one of whom was Klaus Immelmann. Professor Immelmann had recently been called to serve as the first chair for animal behaviour at a German university, and his goal was to make Bielefeld a hub of behavioural biology research and teaching. He quickly succeeded. The facilities in his department were phenomenal, even by international standards. It was an exciting time: the campus was populated by various species of finches, parrots, geese, marmosets, kangaroos, deer, and rodents living in spacious indoor and outdoor enclosures. The founders of behavioural biology, Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch, had just received the Nobel Prize. There was a spirit of optimism in our eastern province of Westphalia.