The Hoopoe Summit: Day 6

Another day at the Hoopoe Summit is over as we are drawing closer to the end of the week. Again we went out with the park rangers who took us to the visitor centre of the national park. They have a small museum where you can see models of some of the rare species, which are hard to spot in the wild, like the purple heron, the Eurasian otter or the great bustard – at about 15 kg one of the heaviest flying animals on earth. In the yard they have some insect hotels, where wild bees and wasps lay their eggs.

Afterwards we learned about the salt lakes and the way specially adapted plants – so called halophytes – deal with the salty soil. We were given a task to mix salt with water in order to recreate the salinity of three different lakes of the area – the Lake Neusiedl, the Zicksee and the Oberstinkersee. And this wasn’t even the best part. There actually was a tasting of the different salt cocktails. They weren’t very tasty, so we won’t take a sip of the lakes any time soon, but we’ll surely remember that there are salty lakes in the area forever.

The declaration session went a little differently today as the team from Georgia distributed three random objects per team after lunch and asked them to create a product that involved the objects in one way or another. They included things like glue, a hat, deodorant, a hair clip and many others. The topic of the day was social entrepreneurship and all of the groups had to develop their own social enterprise with a business plan and an advertising video which was presented to the others in the evening.

It was great fun for everyone and some really creative products were created like a magical hat or a tracker for geese that prevents them from crashing into wind turbines. Of course, the point of the exercise wasn’t to actually be able to go through with the project but just to get an idea of the process. It was very educational to see how many things there are to consider, when you want to start a social enterprise.