20/10/2026
It arrives after everyone else. When the griffon vultures have stripped the carcass and the ravens have picked over the scraps, it comes down. And it takes what nobody else wants: the bones. 🦅
The bearded vulture is one of the most extraordinary birds in Europe. A wingspan of up to nearly three metres, a cream and rust-coloured body, eyes ringed in red, and the tuft of black bristles under its beak that gives it its name. It looks like something out of a legend.
Where other scavengers fight over meat, it has a food almost to itself. Bones make up an estimated 70 to 90 percent of its diet, depending on the region and the season. It's a smart choice. Fresh bone, rich in fat and marrow, holds about as much energy as meat, and it doesn't rot quickly. A carcass can keep feeding it long after everyone else has moved on.
Pieces up to about 25 centimetres long go down whole. For bigger ones, it has a technique worthy of its Spanish name, quebrantahuesos, "the bone-breaker". It grips the bone in its talons, climbs, and drops it onto rock from 20 to 150 metres up. Then it does it again, sometimes more than 40 times for the same bone. Each pair has its own favourite breaking spots, usually one to three, often less than a kilometre from the nest.
And no one has to teach it. Even young vultures raised in captivity, with no parent to copy, start breaking bones on their own a few months after their first flight. Practice does the rest.
Then comes the stomach. Its acidity has never been measured directly in this species, but scientists estimate it at around pH 1, or even lower. In captive birds, most of a meal of rib bones was digested within about a day.
This bird once disappeared from much of Europe, including the entire Alps, persecuted partly because of old fears. In German it's still called Lämmergeier, the "lamb vulture", after a belief that it attacked lambs. It doesn't. Reintroduction in the Alps began in 1986. In France, the first young birds were released in 1987 in the Bargy massif, in Haute-Savoie, and the first chick born in the wild flew there in 1997. Today, France has around 90 territorial pairs across the Pyrenees, the Alps and Corsica.
A bird that eats bones, breaks them from the sky, and finishes what everyone else left behind.
Have you ever spotted a bearded vulture soaring over the mountains? Where?
