Animal · Argentina, Chile, Peru
Andean condor
Vultur gryphus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The Andean condor has one of the widest wingspans of any flying bird, reaching up to about 3.3 metres from one tip to the other. It rides on air that rises along the mountains and flaps its wings for only about one minute of flight in every hundred.
Picture credit: Thomas Fuhrmann (CC BY-SA 4.0) · René Cortin (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the Andean condor live?
Home: mountain cliffs and open country along the Andes.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown: wingspan up to about 3.3 m. It weighs about 11 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A condor is a vulture, and like other vultures it eats animals that are already dead. Its bald head stays cleaner when the bird reaches deep inside a carcass, and its eyes are sharp enough to spot a dead deer or cow from far above. Finding a meal takes time, so a condor may cross more than two hundred kilometres in a day without landing. Males are larger than females, which is unusual among birds of prey, and a male carries a dark red comb on top of his head. Pairs nest on a bare ledge high in the mountains and lay one bluish-white egg, which both parents take turns to keep warm for about eight weeks. The chick can fly at around six months but stays with its parents for another year or more, so a pair usually raises a chick only every second year. Condors can live longer than seventy years. That slow life makes the species hard to replace when grown birds die.
Find it on the globe
Andean condor is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Does a condor hunt live animals?
Hardly ever. Its feet are rather flat, with blunt claws that cannot grip and carry prey the way an eagle's do. Now and then it takes eggs or a newborn animal, but its real work is clearing up carcasses.
Why is its head bald?
Feathers on the head would get sticky and dirty when the bird feeds inside a large carcass. Bare skin is easier to keep clean and dries quickly in the mountain sun, which also kills many germs.
Why has the condor become rarer?
Condors are still shot, and many die after eating carcasses that hold poison meant for pumas and foxes, or lead from bullets. Because a pair raises so few young, every loss weighs heavily on the population.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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