AMUS: balance of the last thirty years of experience in the fight for the conservation and defense of wild fauna

From the moment they saved it helpless and bewildered harrier chicks from the ravenous mouth of a harvester, something that happened in the mid-1990s, until now many summers have passed in which the members of AMUS have watched over those faceless and endangered creatures in the nature.

AMUS is immersed in the most successful and promising phase of its long journey in defense of nature, playing a key role in projects of wide scope and significance. Its persistent efforts over decades and its training have placed it in a scenario where important decisions are made in the future monitoring and management of endangered species and spaces. The hospital, with which it was born, has been the access bridge, the beginning of a whole series of conservation projects and strategies inside and outside Spain.

30 years of AMUS

2024 closes and opens a cycle. They say goodbye to a time that has prepared them to face a complex present and future, full of challenges, including difficult ones, ours, with more tools, more experience and more demands. best of the many people who make up AMUS today.

They dive in and downwind, as they do the thousands of free-flying birds found in the hospitalin a European interinstitutional framework, with several LIFE projects in which they strengthen and diversify relations with countries, scientific entities, governments and homologous associations. Today, AMUS is proud to be an ambassador that has been able to offer alliances and networks in collaboration with endangered species, with their territories and combating problems.

Take a look at this navigation map full of obligations. A portfolio full of dreams was transformed into numerous projects throughout Spain and Europe; with vultures through the network of additional feeding points; strengthening European populations of griffon vultures and black vultures, after hundreds of individuals have been produced in recent years; monitoring specimens with GPS transmitters to investigate their problems; with steppe birds, and as a star the Montagu’s Harrier through a groundbreaking LIFE project implemented by Portugal and Spain called “SOS Pygargus”.

Or with the red kite with the LIFE “Eurokite”, this is the first population reinforcement project in Spain; with large birds of prey such as the Imperial Eagle or the Bonelli’s Eagle in monitoring actions for breeding units in the face of the impacts of climate change, monitoring thousands of hectares of high ecological value, and generating development actions with local communities.

And with a natural hospital full of functions and resources, an international reference that has known it faced with clinical challenges and unique maneuvers in the recovery of very valuable specimens, opening and clarifying biomedicine in wild birds and with powers as impressive as the admission of Iberian lynxes as a center in the reference province in necropsies and on the basis of specimens for their recovery or reintegration in nature.

Ah! And not to forget growing in human teams with departments such as communication and environmental education, very desirable and necessary in the new strategic grid of AMUS. Today AMUS is distributed, but consolidated, dispersed, just like the birds that travel through Europe and Africa, equipped with transmitters and that have passed through our hospital, they carry a unique message, without boundaries, honest, courageous and committed.