Make No Bones About the Lammergeier (Gypaetus barbatus)

• The lammergeier or bearded vulture, as it is sometimes called, is a large bird of prey inhabiting parts of Europe, Asia, northeastern Africa and South Africa. the African lammergeier differs from the more northern group by the lack of a black stripe below the eye.
• Lammergeier is from German, lamm (lamb) and geier (vulture). Today, ornithologists generally agree that it is more closely related to the eagles than to the vultures.
• The adult bird's length can be up to 116 cm and the wingspan up to 274 cm. Its habitat ranges from 1,50-5,000 meters in elevation.
• A large part of its diet consists of bones. If the bone is too large to swallow whole, the bird will drop it onto a large slab of rock to splinter it into smaller pieces. It soars as much as 200 feet in the air clutching the bone in its talons, approaches the rock downwind and drops the bone with great accuracy. It shatters with a loud crack and immediately the lammergeier spirals down to gulp up the pieces before some other scavenger grabs them.
• The sites of the bone dropping are called ossaries (from ossuaries, meaning a place for bones of the dead).
• Lammergeiers are described in ancient Greek and Roman documents. According to the Roman Pliny, Aeschylus, a Greek tragic poet, was killed by a bone dropped by a lammergeier which mistook his bald head for a rock!

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