The Barcelona Zoo, one of the most important sponsors of the festival, has prepared a very attractive exhibition that explains one of the primary objectives that zoos around the world have or should have, their effective involvement in the conservation of global biodiversity .
Regarding fauna, there are critically endangered species that need urgent action to avoid extinction. And it is in this context that in some cases it has been thanks to the work carried out in zoological parks that it has been possible to avoid the total disappearance in the wild of some species of birds.
This has been the case of the largest vulture in the world, the California condor, that of some endemic species of oceanic islands, such as the Mauritius Kestrel, that of parrots victims of live animal traffic and also that of a case much closer, the Lesser Shrike, a species of shrike that has in Catalonia the limit of its western distribution and who just before disappearing its last reproductive nucleus has recovered, in the Lleida plain, with the liberation of individuals born in captivity.
In this exhibition, the Àlex Mascarell’s magnificent illustrations of a handful species of birds will show the positive and the negative side of the situation. On one hand, there will be represented some species with which the Barcelona Zoo or other Zoo are collaborating directly to avoid extinction and others that have already begun to recover in nature thanks to this work. But we will also find some examples of species that have become definitively extinct, and that the last living specimens remained in a Zoo with the aim of achieving their reproduction in captivity and recovery and some more examples of species that their extinction occurred in nature without having the opportunity to carry out captive recovery projects.
