Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen FRS was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals. In the 1960s he collaborated with filmmaker Hugh Falkus on a series of wildlife films, including The Riddle of the Rook and Signals for Survival , which won the Italia prize in that year and the American blue ribbon in 1971. Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he is also noted as the brother of Jan Tinbergen, who... won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He had a third eminent brother, Luuk Tinbergen who committed suicide in 1955 at age 39. Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young. He studied biology at Leiden University and was a prisoner of war during World War II. Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz, and it was several years before the two reconciled.
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