Hooray for vultures!
Mighty vulture back from near extinction
By Colin Nickerson The Boston Globe
Published: October 31, 2006
HARINGSEE, Austria Europe's immense bearded vulture, sometimes called the "bone crusher," boasts a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, plucks meals from avalanche debris, and breeds its chicks in the subzero temperatures of the wintertime Alps. Its gastric juices register a "1" on the pH scale, nearly pure acid. Seething belly bile is a necessity for a creature that subsists mainly on weather-bleached bones.
One tough bird, to be sure, but Gypaetus barbatus has been suffering hard times for the past 100 years or so, all but eradicated from its Alpine roosts. Today, however, the bone crusher is soaring toward a comeback as the continent's most ambitious -- and priciest -- wildlife reintroduction project achieves small but biologically significant success.
The species was hunted nearly to extinction in the Alps by the start of the 20th century, mainly by farmers and sportsmen seeking government-paid bounties on eagles, vultures, and other raptors. But it was ornithologists, ironically, who administered the coup de grace. Dismayed by the bearded vulture's sharp decline, natural history museums dispatched collectors to kill specimens for mounted display.
The last Alpine bearded vulture was bagged in 1913, in Italy's Aosta valley, although some birds survived in zoos and remnant European populations lingered in the Pyrenees and on a few Mediterranean islands, including Corsica and Crete.
"People failed to perceive the beauty of these magnificent, free-ranging animals," said Hans Frey, an Austrian veterinary scientist who since the 1970s has made saving the little-appreciated bird his life's obsession. "Folk legends made the vulture out to be a killer of livestock and small children. Even those who didn't believe such tales saw it as a despised and ugly pest."
Since 1986, Frey and wildlife biologist colleagues have released 144 bearded vultures into their native Alps at roughly $130,000 per bird. Then they crossed their fingers, hoping the vultures eventually would go looking for love.
Breeding the birds in captivity took biological know-how, patience, and veterinary skill. And successfully setting fledglings free at wilderness sites in Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland took careful planning and expertise in geology and vulture habitat.
But then it was up to the vultures to figure out how to forage for food -- and, just as critically, to discover one another, mate, and multiply.
Bone crushers are not especially amorous birds. The vultures are even more finicky about sex than food. They don't reach breeding age until age 5 or older, late for most bird species. They don't care much for one another's company, preferring lives of extreme solitude. They wheel in search of death over aggressively defended individual territories that typically cover 200 square miles of rugged range.
The released birds -- an estimated 120 have survived -- have formed only nine "breeding pairs."
But that's enough: Next year, for the first time, the numbers of baby beardeds born naturally on Europe's most forbidding peaks will match the annual average of six to seven human-reared fledglings released into the wild.
"It's a major threshold -- the birds will be sustaining their own population," said Richard Zink, a wildlife biologist at Austria's Hohe Tauern National Park who coordinates monitoring of the bearded vulture populations.
"On average, only 1 of every 10 bearded vultures released in the wild will join another to form a breeding pair," Zink said. "The others are loners and roamers."
Still, if the vultures can keep up even this seemingly small reproduction rate, the reintroduction of human-raised beardeds to the Alps might end as soon as 2010 as the population becomes self-sustaining.
Frey, overall coordinator of the program and teacher of zoology at Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine, is cautious about proclaiming success.
"Scientifically speaking, it will be 100 or 150 years before we can be certain," he said while inspecting the 32 bearded vultures hunkering in big outdoor cages at Europe's largest vulture-breeding station, located behind his house in rural Haringsee.
"But this is very pleasing progress," he allowed. "So many wild creatures have been lost in Europe. It's exciting to believe we're bringing a species back."
Centuries of lurid legends gave the bearded vulture a bad name. But Frey notes that the bone crusher usually disdains even the putrid meat preferred by other vultures, never mind twitching flesh, opting for a diet that is 90 percent bone. And in the process, the birds play an important ecological cleanup service.
"This is not the gore-spattered, bald-headed creature most people associate with vultures," Frey said. "This is an extraordinary, highly specialized bird that is one of only two large animals on earth" -- the other is the African hyena -- "that can thrive on a diet of bones."
In the wild, it haunts avalanche zones for the bones of ibex and chamois -- Alpine antelopes and wild goats -- killed in slides of rock and snow. It often waits patiently for foxes, ravens, eagles, or other vulture species to pick carcasses clean of meat. On lower meadows, it occasionally will feast on the skeletons of perished farm animals.
"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," Frey said.
If a bone is too large, the vulture will carry it hundreds of feet into the air, drop it on rocks, then snarf up the splinters.
To convince skeptical farmers and hunters that the bone crusher is harmless to livestock and game, Frey keeps rabbits in the vulture cages spread out over the 3 acres of the breeding station. The bunnies hop unmolested beneath the giant birds, watching benignly from perches made from tree limbs. In captivity, the vultures eat well-rotted dead rats and bones collected from road kill.
Frey's breeding station is an eclectic place, serving also as Austria's main raptor center -- sheltering not only bearded vultures but also an array of eagles, hawks, and owls injured in the wild or confiscated from traveling circuses and other illegal owners. Abandoned pet tortoises roam through the yard, a blind cat snoozes above a cage housing magpies, and guinea pigs cavort in a pen.
The bearded vulture takes its name from the tuft of whisker-like feathers beneath its beak. The chin, breast, and leg feathers of most bone crushers are rust-colored not from genes, but from the iron oxide in the mud that the birds compulsively rub into their feathers. Theories for this odd behavior abound -- sexual attraction, protection against parasites, camouflage. "The coloring is just another mystery to this mysterious bird," Zink said.
The bearded vultures lays eggs in mid winter in nests high above the tree line and densely insulated with tufts of wool plucked from the carcasses of mountain goats. The chicks hatch in March, just as receding drifts in Alpine meadows yield an abundance of winter's victims "packed in the snow like so many raisins in a pudding," as Frey put it. "This time of death for so many species is the time of plenty for the vulture."
The international project to restore the bearded vulture to the Alps began in 1976 as Frey -- supported by Germany's Frankfurt Zoological Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and other groups -- started breeding zoo-raised birds. It was a decade before there were enough breeding vultures at the Haringsee station and at zoos from Moscow to San Diego to begin releasing birds into the wild.
Three-month-old vultures are carried in crates to high crags in late May or early June. There they are fed carrion until mid summer, when they master flight and the more difficult task of finding bones.
The released birds, some now 20 years old, are scattered thinly over a swath of mountains stretching from southern France to eastern Austria. Their movements are tracked by 5,000 volunteer spotters -- hikers, bird-watchers, green-minded hunters -- and by satellite monitors and genetic tests that can determine the identity of individual birds through feathers found near aeries.
The hazards for vultures in the wild are many: power lines, ski-lift cables, and illegal poisoned bait set out by farmers for wolves. But the main obstacles to the full comeback of the bearded vulture are really the vast tracts it occupies and its cranky nature.
"They breed relatively late in life and only raise one nestling per year," said Zink . "Life expectancy in the wild is not so good as in captivity. So demographic expansion is slow. But the wild offspring are becoming more numerous. The bearded vulture is once again living free in the Alps."
HARINGSEE, Austria Europe's immense bearded vulture, sometimes called the "bone crusher," boasts a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, plucks meals from avalanche debris, and breeds its chicks in the subzero temperatures of the wintertime Alps. Its gastric juices register a "1" on the pH scale, nearly pure acid. Seething belly bile is a necessity for a creature that subsists mainly on weather-bleached bones.
One tough bird, to be sure, but Gypaetus barbatus has been suffering hard times for the past 100 years or so, all but eradicated from its Alpine roosts. Today, however, the bone crusher is soaring toward a comeback as the continent's most ambitious -- and priciest -- wildlife reintroduction project achieves small but biologically significant success.
The species was hunted nearly to extinction in the Alps by the start of the 20th century, mainly by farmers and sportsmen seeking government-paid bounties on eagles, vultures, and other raptors. But it was ornithologists, ironically, who administered the coup de grace. Dismayed by the bearded vulture's sharp decline, natural history museums dispatched collectors to kill specimens for mounted display.
The last Alpine bearded vulture was bagged in 1913, in Italy's Aosta valley, although some birds survived in zoos and remnant European populations lingered in the Pyrenees and on a few Mediterranean islands, including Corsica and Crete.
"People failed to perceive the beauty of these magnificent, free-ranging animals," said Hans Frey, an Austrian veterinary scientist who since the 1970s has made saving the little-appreciated bird his life's obsession. "Folk legends made the vulture out to be a killer of livestock and small children. Even those who didn't believe such tales saw it as a despised and ugly pest."
Since 1986, Frey and wildlife biologist colleagues have released 144 bearded vultures into their native Alps at roughly $130,000 per bird. Then they crossed their fingers, hoping the vultures eventually would go looking for love.
Breeding the birds in captivity took biological know-how, patience, and veterinary skill. And successfully setting fledglings free at wilderness sites in Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland took careful planning and expertise in geology and vulture habitat.
But then it was up to the vultures to figure out how to forage for food -- and, just as critically, to discover one another, mate, and multiply.
Bone crushers are not especially amorous birds. The vultures are even more finicky about sex than food. They don't reach breeding age until age 5 or older, late for most bird species. They don't care much for one another's company, preferring lives of extreme solitude. They wheel in search of death over aggressively defended individual territories that typically cover 200 square miles of rugged range.
The released birds -- an estimated 120 have survived -- have formed only nine "breeding pairs."
But that's enough: Next year, for the first time, the numbers of baby beardeds born naturally on Europe's most forbidding peaks will match the annual average of six to seven human-reared fledglings released into the wild.
"It's a major threshold -- the birds will be sustaining their own population," said Richard Zink, a wildlife biologist at Austria's Hohe Tauern National Park who coordinates monitoring of the bearded vulture populations.
"On average, only 1 of every 10 bearded vultures released in the wild will join another to form a breeding pair," Zink said. "The others are loners and roamers."
Still, if the vultures can keep up even this seemingly small reproduction rate, the reintroduction of human-raised beardeds to the Alps might end as soon as 2010 as the population becomes self-sustaining.
Frey, overall coordinator of the program and teacher of zoology at Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine, is cautious about proclaiming success.
"Scientifically speaking, it will be 100 or 150 years before we can be certain," he said while inspecting the 32 bearded vultures hunkering in big outdoor cages at Europe's largest vulture-breeding station, located behind his house in rural Haringsee.
"But this is very pleasing progress," he allowed. "So many wild creatures have been lost in Europe. It's exciting to believe we're bringing a species back."
Centuries of lurid legends gave the bearded vulture a bad name. But Frey notes that the bone crusher usually disdains even the putrid meat preferred by other vultures, never mind twitching flesh, opting for a diet that is 90 percent bone. And in the process, the birds play an important ecological cleanup service.
"This is not the gore-spattered, bald-headed creature most people associate with vultures," Frey said. "This is an extraordinary, highly specialized bird that is one of only two large animals on earth" -- the other is the African hyena -- "that can thrive on a diet of bones."
In the wild, it haunts avalanche zones for the bones of ibex and chamois -- Alpine antelopes and wild goats -- killed in slides of rock and snow. It often waits patiently for foxes, ravens, eagles, or other vulture species to pick carcasses clean of meat. On lower meadows, it occasionally will feast on the skeletons of perished farm animals.
"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," Frey said.
If a bone is too large, the vulture will carry it hundreds of feet into the air, drop it on rocks, then snarf up the splinters.
To convince skeptical farmers and hunters that the bone crusher is harmless to livestock and game, Frey keeps rabbits in the vulture cages spread out over the 3 acres of the breeding station. The bunnies hop unmolested beneath the giant birds, watching benignly from perches made from tree limbs. In captivity, the vultures eat well-rotted dead rats and bones collected from road kill.
Frey's breeding station is an eclectic place, serving also as Austria's main raptor center -- sheltering not only bearded vultures but also an array of eagles, hawks, and owls injured in the wild or confiscated from traveling circuses and other illegal owners. Abandoned pet tortoises roam through the yard, a blind cat snoozes above a cage housing magpies, and guinea pigs cavort in a pen.
The bearded vulture takes its name from the tuft of whisker-like feathers beneath its beak. The chin, breast, and leg feathers of most bone crushers are rust-colored not from genes, but from the iron oxide in the mud that the birds compulsively rub into their feathers. Theories for this odd behavior abound -- sexual attraction, protection against parasites, camouflage. "The coloring is just another mystery to this mysterious bird," Zink said.
The bearded vultures lays eggs in mid winter in nests high above the tree line and densely insulated with tufts of wool plucked from the carcasses of mountain goats. The chicks hatch in March, just as receding drifts in Alpine meadows yield an abundance of winter's victims "packed in the snow like so many raisins in a pudding," as Frey put it. "This time of death for so many species is the time of plenty for the vulture."
The international project to restore the bearded vulture to the Alps began in 1976 as Frey -- supported by Germany's Frankfurt Zoological Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and other groups -- started breeding zoo-raised birds. It was a decade before there were enough breeding vultures at the Haringsee station and at zoos from Moscow to San Diego to begin releasing birds into the wild.
Three-month-old vultures are carried in crates to high crags in late May or early June. There they are fed carrion until mid summer, when they master flight and the more difficult task of finding bones.
The released birds, some now 20 years old, are scattered thinly over a swath of mountains stretching from southern France to eastern Austria. Their movements are tracked by 5,000 volunteer spotters -- hikers, bird-watchers, green-minded hunters -- and by satellite monitors and genetic tests that can determine the identity of individual birds through feathers found near aeries.
The hazards for vultures in the wild are many: power lines, ski-lift cables, and illegal poisoned bait set out by farmers for wolves. But the main obstacles to the full comeback of the bearded vulture are really the vast tracts it occupies and its cranky nature.
"They breed relatively late in life and only raise one nestling per year," said Zink . "Life expectancy in the wild is not so good as in captivity. So demographic expansion is slow. But the wild offspring are becoming more numerous. The bearded vulture is once again living free in the Alps."
By Colin Nickerson The Boston Globe
Published: October 31, 2006
HARINGSEE, Austria Europe's immense bearded vulture, sometimes called the "bone crusher," boasts a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, plucks meals from avalanche debris, and breeds its chicks in the subzero temperatures of the wintertime Alps. Its gastric juices register a "1" on the pH scale, nearly pure acid. Seething belly bile is a necessity for a creature that subsists mainly on weather-bleached bones.
One tough bird, to be sure, but Gypaetus barbatus has been suffering hard times for the past 100 years or so, all but eradicated from its Alpine roosts. Today, however, the bone crusher is soaring toward a comeback as the continent's most ambitious -- and priciest -- wildlife reintroduction project achieves small but biologically significant success.
The species was hunted nearly to extinction in the Alps by the start of the 20th century, mainly by farmers and sportsmen seeking government-paid bounties on eagles, vultures, and other raptors. But it was ornithologists, ironically, who administered the coup de grace. Dismayed by the bearded vulture's sharp decline, natural history museums dispatched collectors to kill specimens for mounted display.
The last Alpine bearded vulture was bagged in 1913, in Italy's Aosta valley, although some birds survived in zoos and remnant European populations lingered in the Pyrenees and on a few Mediterranean islands, including Corsica and Crete.
"People failed to perceive the beauty of these magnificent, free-ranging animals," said Hans Frey, an Austrian veterinary scientist who since the 1970s has made saving the little-appreciated bird his life's obsession. "Folk legends made the vulture out to be a killer of livestock and small children. Even those who didn't believe such tales saw it as a despised and ugly pest."
Since 1986, Frey and wildlife biologist colleagues have released 144 bearded vultures into their native Alps at roughly $130,000 per bird. Then they crossed their fingers, hoping the vultures eventually would go looking for love.
Breeding the birds in captivity took biological know-how, patience, and veterinary skill. And successfully setting fledglings free at wilderness sites in Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland took careful planning and expertise in geology and vulture habitat.
But then it was up to the vultures to figure out how to forage for food -- and, just as critically, to discover one another, mate, and multiply.
Bone crushers are not especially amorous birds. The vultures are even more finicky about sex than food. They don't reach breeding age until age 5 or older, late for most bird species. They don't care much for one another's company, preferring lives of extreme solitude. They wheel in search of death over aggressively defended individual territories that typically cover 200 square miles of rugged range.
The released birds -- an estimated 120 have survived -- have formed only nine "breeding pairs."
But that's enough: Next year, for the first time, the numbers of baby beardeds born naturally on Europe's most forbidding peaks will match the annual average of six to seven human-reared fledglings released into the wild.
"It's a major threshold -- the birds will be sustaining their own population," said Richard Zink, a wildlife biologist at Austria's Hohe Tauern National Park who coordinates monitoring of the bearded vulture populations.
"On average, only 1 of every 10 bearded vultures released in the wild will join another to form a breeding pair," Zink said. "The others are loners and roamers."
Still, if the vultures can keep up even this seemingly small reproduction rate, the reintroduction of human-raised beardeds to the Alps might end as soon as 2010 as the population becomes self-sustaining.
Frey, overall coordinator of the program and teacher of zoology at Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine, is cautious about proclaiming success.
"Scientifically speaking, it will be 100 or 150 years before we can be certain," he said while inspecting the 32 bearded vultures hunkering in big outdoor cages at Europe's largest vulture-breeding station, located behind his house in rural Haringsee.
"But this is very pleasing progress," he allowed. "So many wild creatures have been lost in Europe. It's exciting to believe we're bringing a species back."
Centuries of lurid legends gave the bearded vulture a bad name. But Frey notes that the bone crusher usually disdains even the putrid meat preferred by other vultures, never mind twitching flesh, opting for a diet that is 90 percent bone. And in the process, the birds play an important ecological cleanup service.
"This is not the gore-spattered, bald-headed creature most people associate with vultures," Frey said. "This is an extraordinary, highly specialized bird that is one of only two large animals on earth" -- the other is the African hyena -- "that can thrive on a diet of bones."
In the wild, it haunts avalanche zones for the bones of ibex and chamois -- Alpine antelopes and wild goats -- killed in slides of rock and snow. It often waits patiently for foxes, ravens, eagles, or other vulture species to pick carcasses clean of meat. On lower meadows, it occasionally will feast on the skeletons of perished farm animals.
"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," Frey said.
If a bone is too large, the vulture will carry it hundreds of feet into the air, drop it on rocks, then snarf up the splinters.
To convince skeptical farmers and hunters that the bone crusher is harmless to livestock and game, Frey keeps rabbits in the vulture cages spread out over the 3 acres of the breeding station. The bunnies hop unmolested beneath the giant birds, watching benignly from perches made from tree limbs. In captivity, the vultures eat well-rotted dead rats and bones collected from road kill.
Frey's breeding station is an eclectic place, serving also as Austria's main raptor center -- sheltering not only bearded vultures but also an array of eagles, hawks, and owls injured in the wild or confiscated from traveling circuses and other illegal owners. Abandoned pet tortoises roam through the yard, a blind cat snoozes above a cage housing magpies, and guinea pigs cavort in a pen.
The bearded vulture takes its name from the tuft of whisker-like feathers beneath its beak. The chin, breast, and leg feathers of most bone crushers are rust-colored not from genes, but from the iron oxide in the mud that the birds compulsively rub into their feathers. Theories for this odd behavior abound -- sexual attraction, protection against parasites, camouflage. "The coloring is just another mystery to this mysterious bird," Zink said.
The bearded vultures lays eggs in mid winter in nests high above the tree line and densely insulated with tufts of wool plucked from the carcasses of mountain goats. The chicks hatch in March, just as receding drifts in Alpine meadows yield an abundance of winter's victims "packed in the snow like so many raisins in a pudding," as Frey put it. "This time of death for so many species is the time of plenty for the vulture."
The international project to restore the bearded vulture to the Alps began in 1976 as Frey -- supported by Germany's Frankfurt Zoological Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and other groups -- started breeding zoo-raised birds. It was a decade before there were enough breeding vultures at the Haringsee station and at zoos from Moscow to San Diego to begin releasing birds into the wild.
Three-month-old vultures are carried in crates to high crags in late May or early June. There they are fed carrion until mid summer, when they master flight and the more difficult task of finding bones.
The released birds, some now 20 years old, are scattered thinly over a swath of mountains stretching from southern France to eastern Austria. Their movements are tracked by 5,000 volunteer spotters -- hikers, bird-watchers, green-minded hunters -- and by satellite monitors and genetic tests that can determine the identity of individual birds through feathers found near aeries.
The hazards for vultures in the wild are many: power lines, ski-lift cables, and illegal poisoned bait set out by farmers for wolves. But the main obstacles to the full comeback of the bearded vulture are really the vast tracts it occupies and its cranky nature.
"They breed relatively late in life and only raise one nestling per year," said Zink . "Life expectancy in the wild is not so good as in captivity. So demographic expansion is slow. But the wild offspring are becoming more numerous. The bearded vulture is once again living free in the Alps."
HARINGSEE, Austria Europe's immense bearded vulture, sometimes called the "bone crusher," boasts a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, plucks meals from avalanche debris, and breeds its chicks in the subzero temperatures of the wintertime Alps. Its gastric juices register a "1" on the pH scale, nearly pure acid. Seething belly bile is a necessity for a creature that subsists mainly on weather-bleached bones.
One tough bird, to be sure, but Gypaetus barbatus has been suffering hard times for the past 100 years or so, all but eradicated from its Alpine roosts. Today, however, the bone crusher is soaring toward a comeback as the continent's most ambitious -- and priciest -- wildlife reintroduction project achieves small but biologically significant success.
The species was hunted nearly to extinction in the Alps by the start of the 20th century, mainly by farmers and sportsmen seeking government-paid bounties on eagles, vultures, and other raptors. But it was ornithologists, ironically, who administered the coup de grace. Dismayed by the bearded vulture's sharp decline, natural history museums dispatched collectors to kill specimens for mounted display.
The last Alpine bearded vulture was bagged in 1913, in Italy's Aosta valley, although some birds survived in zoos and remnant European populations lingered in the Pyrenees and on a few Mediterranean islands, including Corsica and Crete.
"People failed to perceive the beauty of these magnificent, free-ranging animals," said Hans Frey, an Austrian veterinary scientist who since the 1970s has made saving the little-appreciated bird his life's obsession. "Folk legends made the vulture out to be a killer of livestock and small children. Even those who didn't believe such tales saw it as a despised and ugly pest."
Since 1986, Frey and wildlife biologist colleagues have released 144 bearded vultures into their native Alps at roughly $130,000 per bird. Then they crossed their fingers, hoping the vultures eventually would go looking for love.
Breeding the birds in captivity took biological know-how, patience, and veterinary skill. And successfully setting fledglings free at wilderness sites in Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland took careful planning and expertise in geology and vulture habitat.
But then it was up to the vultures to figure out how to forage for food -- and, just as critically, to discover one another, mate, and multiply.
Bone crushers are not especially amorous birds. The vultures are even more finicky about sex than food. They don't reach breeding age until age 5 or older, late for most bird species. They don't care much for one another's company, preferring lives of extreme solitude. They wheel in search of death over aggressively defended individual territories that typically cover 200 square miles of rugged range.
The released birds -- an estimated 120 have survived -- have formed only nine "breeding pairs."
But that's enough: Next year, for the first time, the numbers of baby beardeds born naturally on Europe's most forbidding peaks will match the annual average of six to seven human-reared fledglings released into the wild.
"It's a major threshold -- the birds will be sustaining their own population," said Richard Zink, a wildlife biologist at Austria's Hohe Tauern National Park who coordinates monitoring of the bearded vulture populations.
"On average, only 1 of every 10 bearded vultures released in the wild will join another to form a breeding pair," Zink said. "The others are loners and roamers."
Still, if the vultures can keep up even this seemingly small reproduction rate, the reintroduction of human-raised beardeds to the Alps might end as soon as 2010 as the population becomes self-sustaining.
Frey, overall coordinator of the program and teacher of zoology at Vienna's University of Veterinary Medicine, is cautious about proclaiming success.
"Scientifically speaking, it will be 100 or 150 years before we can be certain," he said while inspecting the 32 bearded vultures hunkering in big outdoor cages at Europe's largest vulture-breeding station, located behind his house in rural Haringsee.
"But this is very pleasing progress," he allowed. "So many wild creatures have been lost in Europe. It's exciting to believe we're bringing a species back."
Centuries of lurid legends gave the bearded vulture a bad name. But Frey notes that the bone crusher usually disdains even the putrid meat preferred by other vultures, never mind twitching flesh, opting for a diet that is 90 percent bone. And in the process, the birds play an important ecological cleanup service.
"This is not the gore-spattered, bald-headed creature most people associate with vultures," Frey said. "This is an extraordinary, highly specialized bird that is one of only two large animals on earth" -- the other is the African hyena -- "that can thrive on a diet of bones."
In the wild, it haunts avalanche zones for the bones of ibex and chamois -- Alpine antelopes and wild goats -- killed in slides of rock and snow. It often waits patiently for foxes, ravens, eagles, or other vulture species to pick carcasses clean of meat. On lower meadows, it occasionally will feast on the skeletons of perished farm animals.
"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," Frey said.
If a bone is too large, the vulture will carry it hundreds of feet into the air, drop it on rocks, then snarf up the splinters.
To convince skeptical farmers and hunters that the bone crusher is harmless to livestock and game, Frey keeps rabbits in the vulture cages spread out over the 3 acres of the breeding station. The bunnies hop unmolested beneath the giant birds, watching benignly from perches made from tree limbs. In captivity, the vultures eat well-rotted dead rats and bones collected from road kill.
Frey's breeding station is an eclectic place, serving also as Austria's main raptor center -- sheltering not only bearded vultures but also an array of eagles, hawks, and owls injured in the wild or confiscated from traveling circuses and other illegal owners. Abandoned pet tortoises roam through the yard, a blind cat snoozes above a cage housing magpies, and guinea pigs cavort in a pen.
The bearded vulture takes its name from the tuft of whisker-like feathers beneath its beak. The chin, breast, and leg feathers of most bone crushers are rust-colored not from genes, but from the iron oxide in the mud that the birds compulsively rub into their feathers. Theories for this odd behavior abound -- sexual attraction, protection against parasites, camouflage. "The coloring is just another mystery to this mysterious bird," Zink said.
The bearded vultures lays eggs in mid winter in nests high above the tree line and densely insulated with tufts of wool plucked from the carcasses of mountain goats. The chicks hatch in March, just as receding drifts in Alpine meadows yield an abundance of winter's victims "packed in the snow like so many raisins in a pudding," as Frey put it. "This time of death for so many species is the time of plenty for the vulture."
The international project to restore the bearded vulture to the Alps began in 1976 as Frey -- supported by Germany's Frankfurt Zoological Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and other groups -- started breeding zoo-raised birds. It was a decade before there were enough breeding vultures at the Haringsee station and at zoos from Moscow to San Diego to begin releasing birds into the wild.
Three-month-old vultures are carried in crates to high crags in late May or early June. There they are fed carrion until mid summer, when they master flight and the more difficult task of finding bones.
The released birds, some now 20 years old, are scattered thinly over a swath of mountains stretching from southern France to eastern Austria. Their movements are tracked by 5,000 volunteer spotters -- hikers, bird-watchers, green-minded hunters -- and by satellite monitors and genetic tests that can determine the identity of individual birds through feathers found near aeries.
The hazards for vultures in the wild are many: power lines, ski-lift cables, and illegal poisoned bait set out by farmers for wolves. But the main obstacles to the full comeback of the bearded vulture are really the vast tracts it occupies and its cranky nature.
"They breed relatively late in life and only raise one nestling per year," said Zink . "Life expectancy in the wild is not so good as in captivity. So demographic expansion is slow. But the wild offspring are becoming more numerous. The bearded vulture is once again living free in the Alps."