Animal · Spain, Portugal, France
Griffon vulture
Gyps fulvus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The griffon vulture is a huge scavenging bird that sails over the mountains of southern Europe on wings nearly three metres across. It hardly ever flaps, because warm rising air lifts it for hours. From up there it searches the ground for dead animals.
Picture credit: Alexis LOURS (CC BY 4.0) · Pierre Dalous (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Uoaei1 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the griffon vulture live?
Home: Cliffs and open mountains.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Türkiye, Morocco.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: wingspan about 2.3 to 2.8 metres. It weighs about 8 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A griffon vulture starts its day by waiting. Cliffs are cold in the morning, so the bird sits on a ledge with its wings half open until the sun warms the rock and the air begins to rise. Then it steps off, finds a bubble of warm air and circles upward without a single wingbeat. Hundreds of vultures may search the same valley, and each one watches the others as much as it watches the ground. When one bird drops, the rest follow, so a carcass that lay alone in a field can be covered in vultures within minutes. They push their long necks deep inside a body, which is why the neck carries only short down instead of thick feathers. A pair raises just one chick a year on a bare cliff ledge, taking turns on the egg for up to about 58 days. The young bird stays in the nest for months before it learns to ride the wind itself.
Find it on the globe
Griffon vulture 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
Do griffon vultures kill animals?
Almost never. They are built for finding dead animals, not for catching live ones, and their feet are weak compared with an eagle’s. Only very rarely do they take an animal that is already dying.
Why does old meat not make them ill?
Their stomach juice is extremely acidic and destroys many of the germs in rotten meat. That helps farm animals and people too, because vultures clear away carcasses that could otherwise spread disease.
How can they fly so long without getting tired?
They ride thermals, columns of warm air that rise from sun-heated ground. Gliding in them costs a griffon vulture only a little more energy than sitting still, so it can stay up for hours.
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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