The first four lammergeier chicks arrive to the Ordesa breeding area.
They will remain in the National Park for about two months until their release. Four Bearded Vulture chicks, about 40 days old, are already in the field breeding area of the National Park of Ordesa and Monte Perdido, where they will remain for about two months until their release in Picos de Europa and Sierra de Gredos, explained this Friday Juan Antonio Gil, of the Foundation for the Conservation of the Bearded Vulture (FCQ). The initiative is part of the Life Corredores Ibéricos por el Quebrantahuesos project, a transnational plan implemented by the FCQ, the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge of the Government of Spain and the Associação Naturaleza y Hombre of Portugal. The project is financed by the European Union’s Life financial instrument and is being carried out in Natura 2000 network areas, with the aim of guaranteeing the long-term conservation of the bearded vulture in Europe, Gil explained. The four chicks have been transferred to the wild breeding platform for a first adaptation to life in the wild. In front of the infrastructure they have a bearded vulture feeder, managed by the National Park of Ordesa and Monte Perdido, from where “they will see the evolution of the specimens that are outside, in the wild, so that they can acquire the same social behaviors”. “This period of adaptation in the breeding platform is done in conditions of human isolation,” said Gil, who noted that “the chicks never see or hear people and are fed with a puppet” that simulates the figure of the bearded vulture. These first four chicks are part of a group of ten eggs, which were collected between January and February in the Aragonese Pyrenees, for subsequent incubation in the Center for recovery and breeding of bearded vultures that is in La Alfranca, because they came from pairs with high chances of loss, has indicated Gil. When the time comes, the six chicks waiting in Zaragoza will also travel to the National Park to begin this “pre-adaptation” period to life in the wild.
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