These bone-eating vultures were hunted to extinction in the Alps, but conservation efforts have spurred a remarkable recovery.
Bearded vultures have a wing span up to 2.85 meters (9.3 feet) allowing them to hunt over 700 kilometers (435 miles) in a day. The feathers on their neck, head and torso are naturally white, but they dye them orange by covering themselves in the iron oxide-rich mud found in the mountains and highlands where they live. However, their name comes from the distinctive black tuft of feathers under their beak.
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Bearded vultures are scavengers, and up to 85% of their diet is bone. Historically, they were called “ossifrage,” derived from the Latin for “bone breaker.” They mostly swallow bones whole, their strong stomach acid breaking them down, but if a bone is too big, they will drop it from height onto a rock to break it and expose the nutrient rich marrow inside.
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While Alpine farmers no longer blame the vultures for missing sheep, or children, the birds are still threatened. Accidental poisoning through eating animal carcasses containing drugs, pathogens or steroids, collisions with power lines and wind turbines and habitat degradation have reduced the global population — which spans from western Spain to China — by as much as 29% in the last three generations. Exacerbating this problem is their slow breeding rate. A breeding pair will only lay one or two eggs a year, and even if both hatch, the stronger chick will kill its weaker sibling. Here, a bearded vulture in the wild shows off its name-sake feathers.
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Initial attempts by conservationists to reintroduce the bearded vulture involved capturing birds in Afghanistan and releasing them in the Alps, but the project failed due to the difficulty in capturing and transporting the birds. However, in 1986, three birds that had been raised in captivity at a center in Austria were released successfully in the country’s mountains, leading to a flurry of further releases across the Alps. The young birds are put in artificial nests on cliffs, enabling them to acclimatize to the new environment, and after 20 to 30 days they take their first flight. Young bearded vultures are known for traveling vast distances. In 2020, one bird flew 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) from Haute-Savoie in the French Alps to the Peak District in the north of England. Regardless of how far they roam, when they reach adulthood, they typically return home. Here, conservationists climb to a release site in the Bavarian Alps in June, 2021.
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The Alpine population is increasing “exponentially,” José Tavares, director of the Vulture Conservation Foundation, told CNN. Now that the population is stable, the team have started releasing genetically distinct birds to increase the diversity of the population so “they’re fully equipped to survive, even in a period of climate change.” Pictured here, a captive-bred chick at Vallcalent Specialized Breeding Unit in Spain.
Hansruedi Weyrich/Vulture Conservation Foundation
While releases in the Alps are winding down as the population grows naturally, the VCF is working on “replication and expansion” projects in Valencia and Andalucia in Spain, the Massif Central in France, and the Balkans, as well as possible projects in North Africa, said Tavares. Here, a bearded vulture is photographed among griffon vultures in the Spanish Catalan Pyrenees.
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Another conservation project in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of Lesotho and South Africa is working to save the last bearded vultures in the southern hemisphere. The Bearded Vulture Recovery Program did not have a captive breeding program when it started, so instead, when a vulture lays two eggs, the team takes the second egg from the nest, which would be killed by its sibling anyway, and raises the chicks in captivity before releasing them. They are now raising 27 birds in captivity and aim to reach 150 breeding pairs in the wild. With these global conservation efforts, there is hope that bearded vultures will continue to soar across mountains all over the world. Pictured here, a bearded vulture in flight in Giant's Castle Game Reserve, South Africa.
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