Spain has a very ugly bird that does not want it to become extinct. And all of Europe depends on you not doing it

For the last decade, Villafranca de los Barros (in the heart of the province of Badajoz) was the European vulture capital. More than 600 black and griffon vultures They have left the AMUS wildlife hospital in Villafranqués to repopulate places in France, Sicily, Cyprus or Bulgaria.

Now and this is the news, receives 15 specimens of Italian vultures.

Are we running out of Egyptian vultures? Are there few in Spain? It depends on how we define “few.” It is true that the numbers continue to fall in Aragón, Andalusia and part of Castilla y León; However, it is no less true that around 82% of all Egyptian vultures in Europe.

And then? Why do we want twelve birds? Essentially, because the Italian Egyptian Vultures are having a very bad time. The Cisalpine country has only a dozen wild breeding pairs and needs Spain to keep the genetics and breeding capacity alive.

The idea is to use the Italian specimens to reinforce the European capacity to obtain chickens (something that, in this species, is especially difficult).

And scavengers, despite the cultural disdain we have for them, are important. Only Iberian vultures They remove bodies from the field for a value of about 45 million a year and save about 77,000 tons of CO2 in the same period. But there are even much clearer cases: India, for example.

Eyal Frank and Anant Sudarshan of the Harris School of Public Policy and the University of Warwick they did the math of the economic impact of the loss of vultures in the subcontinent. We talk about $69.4 billion annually derived from mortality and the economic costs associated with premature deaths. “The collapse of vultures in India provides a clear example of the kind of hard-to-reverse and unpredictable costs that the loss of a species can have on humans,”

The great European hope. If it works, many of the first chickens will be released in Italy with the idea of ​​​​reinforcing the wild population of southern Italy. After that, they will be used to reinforce other weakened nuclei: first in Spain and then in the rest of the continent.

In this sense, Spain has become the last great European reservoir. And that between poisoned baits (979 corpses between 2019 and 2023), power lines and wind turbines, it’s not that we treat vultures very well.

Image | Nitish Patel

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