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You are here: Home Life in News Focus Spain’s vultures receive 'five-star' daily feast

01/06/2009Spain’s vultures receive 'five-star' daily feast

A vulture refuge set up in eastern Spain helps ensure there is enough food for the starving predators.

Hundreds of vultures surround retired sailor Jose Ramon Moragrega before noisily feasting on the mass of dead rabbits he dumps from a red wheelbarrow onto a patch of gravel.

Fuelled by a passion for the large birds, the 57-year-old has repeated this ritual each morning for the past two decades at his property near the town of Valderrobres in the mountains of Aragon in eastern Spain.

Each day, "Vultureman", as he calls himself, feeds the predators between 100 and 200 rabbits not fit for human consumption that he gets for free at a local slaughterhouse.

Feeding the vultures: Between 400 and 500 birds turn
up to feast on the dead rabbits on a good feeding day.
 
It takes them only half an hour to devour the meal.

But his vulture refuge, complete with drinking trough and perches, did not always enjoy its current success, with 400 and 500 birds now turning up for the feeding on a good day.

At the beginning they stayed away.

"It took three years before the vultures descended to eat," he told AFP as he stood on one of two observatories on his property that are open to the public for a fee of between EUR 4 to 15.

"At the beginning it was like a game. I would lay down the food in the morning and I would collect it at night. When the first ones came to eat, I was really pleased," added Moragrega.

"Man is the only predator of the vulture. It is a species which has been persecuted since ancient Greece for cultural reasons, a species that is very afraid of us," he said.

Spain is home to 80 percent of Europe's vultures, according to Aragon forest ranger Esteban La Torre Abella.

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