AMUS (Action for the Wild World) has presented today in Badajoz the project “Conservation actions of the red kite in Spain”, an initiative that has the support of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry for Ecological Transition.

Ignacio Torres, deputy director of the Biodiversity Foundation, participated in the presentation, in which he stressed that it is “a strategic project for the conservation of the species”. Torres referred to the twentieth anniversary of the Biodiversity Foundation, which is celebrated in 2018, thanking “the work of the entities, which, like AMUS, have developed the almost 2,000 projects carried out. Together we have multiplied our reach and it has allowed us to advance in the protection of nature in our country.”

In these 20 years of history, the work of the Biodiversity Foundation has allowed it to act on 200 species and improve the conservation status of some as emblematic as the Iberian lynx, the brown bear, the imperial eagle, the loggerhead turtle or the posidonia.

The main objective of the red kite conservation project, whose actions will end in July 2019, is to obtain a diagnosis of the red kite population and test new methodologies for its conservation that can be applied in areas of low population density, in order to increase its reproductive numbers. The initiative is being developed in several regions of the province of Badajoz and in the Sierra de Aracena, in Huelva.

This is a project that will serve to establish the real starting point of the situation of the species, by carrying out censuses of both the breeding population and chicks, in addition to allowing us to know what use of the space the adult population of red kites makes, which will facilitate the detection of mortality points as well as priority spaces for their conservation.

This species is listed as “Endangered” in the Spanish Catalogue of Threatened Species. Its population has experienced a sharp decline in recent decades.