Andean condor

Its wingspan is billed as the largest of any land bird, but typical adults span 2.7 to 3.1 m and the marabou stork runs it close. Its real record is weight: males reach 15 kg, making it the heaviest bird that lives by soaring.

Vulnerable is the global Red List status, raised from Near Threatened in 2020, with about 6,700 adults left. The threats are people: carcasses poisoned to kill foxes and pumas, one of which killed 34 condors at once in Mendoza, Argentina, in 2018, and lead from bullets in the carrion they eat.

Soaring is nearly free for a condor, but taking off is not. In the 2020 tagging study more than three quarters of all flapping happened during takeoff, and even with the weak thermals of winter the birds were predicted to flap for only about 2 seconds per kilometre.

Unusually for a bird of prey, the male is the larger sex. Males carry the fleshy comb on the head and have brown eyes; females have no comb and deep red eyes.

It is one of the longest-lived birds known. There is no good data for wild birds, but a male called Thaao lived to 79 at Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo, and Kuzya spent 72 years at the Moscow Zoo.

The range runs the length of the Andes and down to the Pacific coast of Peru and Chile, where condors scavenge dead sea lions and seabirds. In Venezuela and Colombia it is now very rare.