Suspended Sentence For Poisoning Osprey
January 27th, 2010
A farmer from Castril in Granada has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for the poisoning of a female osprey; the osprey was released in 2007 under the Andalucian Ministry of Environment’s Reintroduction Program. The ruling was accepted by all parties, and the judge agreed to grant a suspension of the sentence for two years, in exchange for not offending in that period of time. The offender, aged 68, has also been disqualified from hunting and fishing during the term of the sentence.
The man was taken into custody on the 1st of May 2008, after being caught placing pieces of meat with traces of a prohibited toxic substance in an area of the Natural Park of Sierra de Castril. The farmer was caught in the exact location where, just five days earlier, the corpse of the female osprey, named ‘Segura’ (Safe), was found. The bird was born on the 8th of February 2007 at a breeding centre in Cazorla and had been released in the Sierra de Segura (Jaén) in May of that year.
Since her release, ‘Segura’, had adapted perfectly to the new environment and had showed the same ability to search for food and shelter as her wild counterparts. According to the police, at first they thought she could have died from gunfire, while a second autopsy determined that the death was due to poisoning.
The Reintroduction Program has released five males and four females in the Sierra de Cazorla. Of the four females, three have died through poisoning – two of them in Castril, while a third was found dead in Jaen – and unfortunately the one remaining female had died of natural causes.
