Birds
Vulture
Cathartidae and Old World vultures · also called vultures, buzzard
A vulture makes its living from death. It circles for hours on rising air, finds a carcass by sight or, in a few species, by smell, and then eats meat so rotten that it would kill almost anything else — protected by a bald head it can plunge into a body cavity and a stomach acid close to battery acid that destroys anthrax, cholera, and rabies as it digests.
Overview
“Vulture” covers two unrelated bird groups that both evolved the same lifestyle. The New World vultures (family Cathartidae — the condors and the turkey vulture) are not close relatives of the Old World vultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe, which sit among the eagles and hawks. Both have a bald head, broad soaring wings, and a diet of almost pure carrion. There are 23 species in all.
Built to scavenge
A vulture soars for hours on thermals to search huge areas, which is why it appears only after the morning sun makes the air rise. The bald head stays clean when the bird feeds inside a carcass and doubles as a heat radiator. The stomach acid and immune system let it safely digest disease-ridden meat — and by stripping a carcass to bone in hours, a group of vultures removes disease reservoirs from the landscape. The bearded vulture even eats bone, dropping large ones onto rocks to shatter them.
Status
Vultures are assessed as Endangered overall, trend decreasing — one of the most threatened bird groups on Earth, with over half of the 23 species threatened. Several Asian species crashed 95 to 99 per cent in a decade from the cattle drug diclofenac, and African vultures are falling from deliberate poisoning at poached carcasses, powerline collisions, and the trade in vulture parts. India’s vulture collapse is linked to a surge in feral dogs and tens of thousands of extra human rabies deaths.
Vulture: common questions
How do vultures find dead animals?
Mostly by sight, and in a few species also by smell. Old World vultures and most New World vultures have superb eyesight and hunt from great height, scanning a huge area of ground and also watching the behaviour of other vultures, so that one bird descending draws in dozens from kilometres around within minutes. The turkey vulture and a couple of its close relatives are unusual in having a well-developed sense of smell and can locate a hidden carcass under a forest canopy by detecting the gases of early decay, which is why turkey vultures often find carcasses first and other vultures follow them in.
Can vultures really eat rotten, diseased meat safely?
Yes, to a remarkable degree. Vulture stomach acid is among the strongest of any animal, with a pH low enough to dissolve bone and kill most bacteria and viruses on contact, and the birds carry a gut microbe community and immune defences adapted to a diet of decay. This lets them consume carcasses infected with anthrax spores, botulinum toxin, cholera, and rabies without becoming ill and without passing the diseases on, because the pathogens are destroyed rather than shed. By removing infected bodies quickly, vultures break disease transmission chains that would otherwise reach livestock, other wildlife, and people.
Why are vultures endangered when there is no shortage of dead animals?
Because they are being killed faster than they breed, and vultures reproduce slowly, raising one chick every year or two. The single biggest cause has been poisoning. In South Asia, the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, given to cattle, caused fatal kidney failure in vultures that fed on the carcasses and wiped out around 95 per cent or more of three species in the 1990s and 2000s. In Africa, poachers lace elephant and other carcasses with poison specifically to kill the circling vultures that would reveal the kill to rangers, and vultures are also poisoned as suspected livestock predators and taken for traditional medicine. Powerlines, wind turbines, and habitat loss add further losses.
What is the difference between a vulture and a buzzard?
It depends on the country. In North America, buzzard is a common informal name for the turkey vulture, a true vulture, while the birds that Europeans call buzzards, in the genus Buteo, are known as hawks. In Britain and much of the Old World, buzzard means those Buteo hawks, medium-sized soaring birds of prey that hunt live rodents and rabbits, and it is never used for vultures, which are a separate thing. So an American saying a buzzard is circling usually means a vulture waiting on carrion, and a Briton saying the same usually means a hawk hunting live prey.