Card #044 · Birds
Bearded vulture
Gypaetus barbatus
Uncommon NT · Near Threatened
Field notes
- Classification
- Order Accipitriformes · Family Accipitridae
- Range
- Mountains of Europe, Africa & Asia
- Size
- 94–125 cm (37–49 in)
- Weight
- 4.5–7.8 kg (10–17 lb)
- Lifespan
- ~21 yrs (wild)
- Diet
- Mostly bone
Most Notable
The only bird that lives almost entirely on bone, some 70 to 90 percent of its diet. It carries large bones aloft and drops them onto rocks from up to 150 m to shatter them, then feeds on the marrow inside.
Adults are not born orange. They bathe in iron-rich red mud and soil, staining their pale head and breast feathers a rusty orange, a cosmetic coloring found in no other bird that may signal an individual's status.
With a wingspan approaching 2.8 m (over 9 feet), it soars along mountain cliffs and ridgelines across three continents.
An old name for it, ossifrage, means bone-breaker; it is one of very few animals able to digest bone, dissolving the shards with extremely strong stomach acid.
Persecuted to extinction across the Alps by the early 1900s, it was reintroduced there beginning in 1987 and once again breeds in the mountains of central Europe.
Range: High mountains of Europe, Africa, and Central and South Asia.