Before the release, we marked Grigorii with a special transmitter, secured by his Godmother - Ralitsa Hess. Nencho fearlessly helped sewing the harness of the transmitter and even managed to tough his namesake. Green Balakns guarantees that no Grigorii was harmed during the meeting, as both characters still own their full set of feathers / fingers.
Journalists, volunteers of Green Balkans from Plovdiv and interns of the Wildlife Rescue Centre also took part in the release.
Grigorii flew perfectly and despite the strong wind, as he has already been out, he immediately joined the other vultures waiting outside. There our Otec quickly fell into a noisy argument with his old fellows and was left alone to angrily look up on us from the top of the hill.
His transmitter it already operational and they will soon visualize on our website here.
Do not forget that the Otec is marked with wing-tags and rings K4L.
After we sent the bird off, we gave Nencho a toy vulture and a picture and he amused us with some magic tricks!
The whole team of Green Balkans is extremely grateful to Nencho Ilchev and his team for their interest and support!
We do hope that we have gained some more vulture friends and they are always welcome to visit us!
Some history:
Maybe you remember that, moved by the “Stolichani v poveche” Bulgarian series, the regular viewer Ralitsa Hess decided to adopt and name one of our birds. We chose K4L for her, as this vulture, alike the TV character, in search of easy life, fell into the hands of Romanian shepherds, who asked for ransom to let him go. K4L however apparently hatched under a lucky star, as he was not only rescued but also his faith moved Ralitsa, who secured funds for purchasing a special transmitter to track Grigorii from now on.
Grigorii himself stayed at the Wildlife Rescue Centre at Green Balkans in order to recover from his adventure and after our vets decided that he deserved a second chance, he was transported to the Central Balkan adaptation aviary.
For more information, please contact:
Elena Kmetova
Project manager of the Vultures Return in Bulgaria
Phone: + 359 885 219 557; ekmetova@greenbalkans.org
