<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260305-how-vultures-returned-from-alpine-extinction>
“In the autumn of 2025, wildlife experts in the French Alps made a surprising
discovery: a frail, weakened bearded vulture found lying on the ground turned
out to be Balthazar, a bird released under a conservation programme in 1988,
who had vanished from observations. Having been presumed dead, at over 37 years
old, he is in fact the oldest bearded vulture ever to have been recorded in the
wild.
Over his long life, Balthazar witnessed the return of his own species to Alpine
skies and cliffs, as bearded vultures have soared back from local extinction.
Bearded vultures are majestic, cliff-nesting birds with wing spans of 2.5m
(8.2ft) or more, about the size of a flying door. Their diet is one of their
many intriguing features: they are thought to be the only animal that is
ossivorous, meaning, they feed mainly on bones.
The Spanish name for bearded vulture,
quebrantahuesos (bone-breaker), in fact
hints at the complex acrobatics this diet involves. The birds scavenge bones
from carcasses, then drop them onto rocks from a great height to smash them
into smaller pieces. They often have favourite bone-breaking sites, known as
ossuaries, close to their nests.
These bone-smashing birds used to roam the mountains of southern Europe but
were hunted into extinction in the Alps and were last seen there in the early
1900s, surviving only as tiny wild populations in some other areas of Europe.
Beginning in 1986, however, and over a number of decades, conservationists
released a total of over 260 bearded vultures bred in captivity into the Alpine
regions of Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France and Germany.
Balthazar was among those early releases in the 1980s, and fathered the first
chick raised in the wild in the Alps, after the species had been absent for
decades. Today, bearded vultures are successfully breeding and raising chicks
in the wild again. In 2025, the wild population of bearded vultures in the Alps
passed 100 breeding pairs for the first time, to a total of 118. The population
is self-sustaining (you can follow some of their awe-inspiring tracked journeys
across wild valleys, ridges and rivers on these maps).
"It's a very successful story, a very beautiful story," says José Tavares, the
director of the Vulture Conservation Foundation, one of the main organisations
behind the reintroduction programme. "It's a huge success, demonstrating that
when there is will and a little bit of funding and a little bit of political
support, we can actually reverse the loss of biodiversity and achieve fantastic
results," Tavares says.”
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
