OUR VISIT TO VALLCALENT

Last 10th of April we visited the "Centre of Fauna Recuperation" in Vallcalent.Those centres are like an animal hospital, they take wounded animals that they or any person can find and they heal them. It' s also like a hotel for the animals during its migration for they have food and nests to rest and to eat in their long journey going south.

When we got there, we saw a stork in its nest just at the entrance of the centre, and our guides told us that they found it wounded, and when she was fine she didn't want to leave, and she stayed there...


We also noticed how big the nest was. They told us that its weight can reach 500kg, the stork goes building on the same nest every year, and sometimes, they have to take away a part of the nest for it represents a danger, because it can fall down or destruct the structure that holds the nest. There were some other storks that only use the centre in its migratory journey, they only rest and eat there.

They divided us into two groups depending on our levels. We start the visit, and first we saw a video that explained what did they do there, what kind of animals they took in, etc. In the room there were some reproductions made at real scale of some of the beautiful birds that live in our mountains.

After that we visited the zone where the convalescent birds were, some of them are into a huge cage and some others fly freely. In the centre, they don't want the birds to be in contact with the human presence for a long time, because it can be dangerous for them, not everybody love animals.In this picture you can see one of the birds that was flying freely.


We went to a little wooden cabin, from there we could see a small lake with all the animals that can live there. It was an ecosystem characteristic of humid zones. The animals of the lake weren't in contact with humans; we could only see them from these windows.
They gave us a pair of binoculars to each one of us, and a briefcase with all the animals living in the lake, and we had to find them. There were ducks, gooses, flamingos, and turtles... all of them autochthonous species though.Those are some of the ones we saw.



Then we went into a room used as a laboratory, and we had two cups of water, one of them ad water from the lake, the other one from the tap. We had to verify temperature, acidity, take out the insects and look them up with a microscope...and we saw that the dirty water was hotter and had a different acidity than the clean water.In these pictures you can see us checking the water.


That was the last activity, we had lunch, and we walked around to see other animals, there were a lot more, all of them had something in common, they were wild and autochthonous animals. But those were our favourites!