30 years of the Bearded Vulture Recovery Plan: more than 90 breeding pairs and 400 birds.
The La Alfranca center has been working for three decades to protect and recover this endangered species and has helped to repopulate areas in other communities Since it was launched in 1994, the Bearded Vulture Recovery Plan has worked to protect and recover this species, which is still in danger of extinction. Then, there were 38 breeding pairs in the Community and today there are more than 90 and the total number of these birds in Aragon exceeds 400. The President of Aragon, Jorge Azcón, and the Minister of Environment and Tourism, Manuel Blasco, have visited this Wednesday the Center for Recovery and Breeding of the Bearded Vulture in Human Isolation (CRIAH), located in La Alfranca (Zaragoza). Azcón thanked the work “of all the workers” during this time and remarked “the spectacular data”. “Although the bearded vulture is still an endangered species, we have gone from 38 breeding pairs in 1994 to more than 90 today. There has been an extraordinary change in the protection of the species,” he stressed. Among other things, at La Alfranca they incubate the at-risk eggs rescued from the Pyrenees. In 14 years, 55 chicks have hatched, four in the last few weeks. A team raises them so that they can return to their natural habitat. When they pass their first weeks of life, they are transferred to Ordesa National Park where they live with other birds. The probability that they survive the first year is 93 percent. All this work has increased the population of bearded vultures in the Community. “When the bearded vulture recovery plan began in Aragon we were around 35 breeding units, so the population has tripled, it has been a successful species in conservation in Spain,” said the president of the Foundation for the Conservation of the Bearded Vulture, Óscar Díez. In this sense, Azcón wanted to value the work developed in Aragón. ” In Spain there are 217 breeding pairs, that more than 90 are in Aragon says a lot about the role of the Community in the conservation of biodiversity and, more specifically, of this species. Without the work of Aragon there would be no bearded vulture in other parts of Spain,” he said. Within the framework of this program, Aragon has ceded lammergeier offspring for the repopulation of other autonomous communities, such as Asturias, Cantabria and Castilla y León. “It is very important that the different autonomous communities collaborate in successful biodiversity projects such as this one,” the Aragonese president stressed. The Foundation for the Conservation of the Bearded Vulture, directed by Gerardo Báguena, has several lines of work, several projects, one of them the program of rescue, breeding, release and monitoring of bearded vultures in the Iberian Peninsula, which is the one carried out in the center of Zaragoza.
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