About the museum:
Many of the foreign and Croatian ornithologists of the past would tour the valley of the Neretva and collect animals for the collections of various institutions, even buying and selling them. An exception was the celebrated Croatian ornithologist Dragutin Rucner, who in recognition of the city’s having helped him in his bird research left to Metković a valuable ornithological collection in which there are the preparations of many species that are already now rare and endangered, proofs of the original natural wealth of the delta of the biggest river of the Croatian Adriatic basin. Today’s Metković Ornithological Collection was created at the initiative of the one-time unique Hunting Club in Metković, in the 1948-1958 period, and was supplemented on the whole up to 1966. The hunters helped to collect the specimens, which were prepared by Dragutin Rucner (1910-1996), who was an outstanding taxidermist. The collection was opened for the public the first time in 1952, and was moved to the current premises in the ground floor of the theatre building and into new display cases and officially opened in 1966. The book “On the Life of the Birds of the Neretva Valley” by Dragutin Rucner helped to make the collection popular. During subsequent years some preparations of mammals and of one snake were added to the purely bird collection, which also has a relief of the area of the Neretva delta and the traditional objects for hunting and fishing: boats, sculls, fish traps, nets and shotguns. The collection then already contains objects that we might refer to as the germ of a more complex natural history museum.
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