Up in the mountain town of Cazorla in Andalucia for the next three days over 140 people who work with bearded vultures have gathered together to discuss their work conserving Europe’s rarest vulture for our Annual Bearded Vulture Meeting.
Annual Bearded Vulture Meeting 2018
The programme brings the bearded vulture community together each year to discuss and share our work. Over the two days of presentations we’ll hear from the pioneering work tackling threats such as illegal wildlife poisoning and making electricity infrastructure safe, the latest updates from the captive-breeding stock of birds in the specialised breeding centres and the results of monitoring of the wild population across Europe. The final day of the Annual Meeting delegates will head out on field trips to the Guadalentín Breeding Centre, see a demonstration of an anti-poison dog unit and visit the breeding territory of breeding pairTono and Blimunda.
Annual Bearded Vulture Meeting 2018 programme 
Annual Bearded Vulture Meeting 2018 Programme (final) Annual Meeting BV Programme 2018 final . Adobe Acrobat Document 273.4 KB Download
You can follow the Bearded Vulture Annual Meeting by following #BeardedVulture2018 on Facebook and Twitter.
Bearded vultures in Andalucía
The bearded vulture reintroduction programme in Andalucía (Sierras de Cazorla, Segura, Castril and Las Villas), led by the Junta de Andalucía, in collaboration with Fondación Gypaetus and the Vulture Conservation Foundation, started back in 1996, with the first birds being released in 2006 following their extinction in the area in the 1980’s. In 2018 four birds were released into the wild from specialised breeding centres Guadalentín (Centro de Cría de Quebrantahuesos) in Andalucía, Guadalentín (Centro de Cría de Quebrantahuesos), Richard Faust Zentrum Breeding Centre in Austria and Green Balkans in Bulgaria.
The 2018 bearded vultures released into the wild in Andalucía, Iruela, Biosphere, Pencil, Suertesomera
Since 2006, and including this years’ birds, 54 birds have been released in the area, with the releases becoming a popular annual fixture in the diary for locals. The reintroduction programme in the areas was boosted in 2015 when a pair began breeding, marking an important milestone for bearded vulture comeback.
This year two pairs are successfully raising a chick in the wild, while two other territorial pairs are well established and may begin breeding in the next few years.
