The Spanish Imperial Eagle breeding centre Seville confirmed this weekend the birth a new hatchling, after an egg was artifically incubated following its rescue last week from an abandoned nest.

The egg was found abandoned in a nest built some 25m up in a eucalyptus tree in the Doñana National Park and was transferred to an incubator, where it hatched this weekend, bringing the centre's total number of births of this endangered species to eight in the past four years.

The Ministry of Environment of the Junta de Andalucía made a commitment at the beginning of this decade to curb predatory mortality of this emblematic Spanish bird, introducing measures to rescue abandoned eggs in nests and to oversee the subsequent hatching and rearing of the birds.

The previous seven chicks have all been successfully released into the wild in the Doñana National Park, in an attempt to boost dwindling numbers, and in the region of La Janda in Cadiz, where experts are trying to reintroduce this endangered species.

Other measures have been introduced to promote the growth of the imperial eagle population, including supplementary feeding to reduce and even eliminate absences from the next during the breeding season.

The head of environment management at the Junta de Andalucía, Javier Madrid, underlined the importance of the centre's work saying, "We have increased considerably the viability and the number of eggs that hatch, precisely because of the close eye we keep on the nests and the way we monitor the birds; our success is being copied in other autonomous communities."
 
In 2006 there were around 220 pairs of the Spanish Imperial Eagle reported in Spain and 2 in Portugal, and though numbers are showing signs of recovery, it is still an endangered species. A small population is preserved in Doñana National Park, but its stronghold is the dehesa woodlands of central and south-west Spain.