Griffon vultures-NATURAL ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANERS

Griffon vultures are protected birds by law. Griffon Vulture is a bird of prey from the hawks family. It belongs to the ancestors of the Old World scavengers. The bird has a relatively small head that it holds down in flight, large wings and a short tail that looks cut off. This bird has a wingspan of 2.40-2.80 meters. Griffon Soup’s life expectancy is 30 to 40 years. They reach sexual maturity between the ages of 5 and 7 years. It breeds between January and March, and the female lays only one egg between mid-January and late February.

They feed exclusively on dead animals, most commonly large mammals. Griffon vultures never attack live prey and feed exclusively on dead animals – carcasses. When one griffon vulture finds a carcass, it performs a specific mode of flight that signals to other vultures to come to feed because these are animals that are social and feed in colonies. In the process of searching for food, they can travel about 200 km daily and range 50 to 60 km from the colony. They detect food through a highly developed sense of sight, which, as determined, can detect an object of only 30 cm in length at a distance of 3 km. A large number of birds often gather around the dead animal, among which there is a struggle to establish a hierarchy. First they eat the dominant birds that are the most aggressive, then the “candidates”, the birds that stand and eat after them, and finally, when the “candidates” are distant, they eat the “mass” that other birds make. These birds are natural environmental cleaners. Their body can withstand the composition of a dead animal and use it for energy.

Nature itself is amazing, it actually gave us the natural environmental cleaners we need to protect and become aware of what we have!