The vulture

📖 In short

The vulture is a very large bird of prey that soars high in the sky for hours, hardly flapping its wings. It mostly eats dead animals, and most vultures have a featherless head and neck and a strong hooked beak.

🤩 Did you know?

A condor's wingspan can reach 3 meters.
Some vultures are up to 140 centimeters long.
A vulture's stomach is very strong and can digest food that would make any other animal ill.
Vultures' feathers are usually all one color: brown, black or white.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Nature's cleaner

Eating dead animals may seem strange, but it's very useful! Vultures clear nature of carcasses before they rot and spread disease.

🔍 Why is its head bald?

When a vulture puts its head inside a dead animal to eat, it doesn't get its feathers dirty, because its head has none. And sunlight cleans its bare skin and kills germs.

💡 Soaring without tiring

A vulture uses warm air rising from the ground to climb and circle in the sky for hours, watching the ground with its sharp eyes to find food.

🎯 The biggest flying birds

Vultures include the Andean condor, one of the biggest flying birds in the world, and the bearded vulture, which drops bones from high up to break them, then eats what's inside!