This week we look at a couple of unusual vultures, the bearded vulture and the Egyptian vulture. Thanks to Maureen J. who recommended this week’s topic! The bearded vulture, badass bird: This bearded vulture is probably thinking about eating bones right now: The Egyptian vulture cares about its appearance: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. Halloween is over, we’re all pretty sick of candy, and it’s time to move on to something besides monsters. Something that is not associated with Halloween candy in any way, preferably. I ate, like, three bags of gummy spiders by myself this year. Special thanks to Maureen J. who recently made several topic recommendations. One of her suggestions in particular is taking me down various research rabbit holes, which is a lot of fun but means it’ll be a while before that episode is ready. So in the meantime let’s learn about one of her other suggested topics, vultures. Vultures are divided into two big groups, old world and new world vultures. The two groups are related, but not closely. Today we’re only looking two old world vultures, and in fact, let’s start with a bird that’s considered an old world vulture but is actually not any more closely related to them than the new world vultures are. That’s the bearded vulture. The bearded vulture lives in the high mountains in parts of Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe, and like other vultures it spends a lot of its time waiting for animals to die or just looking for already-dead animals that it can eat. Unlike most other vultures it often gets impatient and cuts out the waiting part by hunting small animals. It especially likes tortoises. Like golden eagles, the bearded vulture will scoop up a tortoise, carry it way way up high, and drop it. Then it coasts down and eats the smashed tortoise. There are stories that the bearded vulture will also sometimes attack larger prey with its wings, driving the animal over a cliff where it plunges to its death. This is a hardcore bird. To add to the general air of all bearded vultures secretly being members of Norwegian death metal bands, they also wear corpse makeup. I don’t mean the bird’s ordinary coloring, although it is pretty impressive. Unlike other vultures, it doesn’t have a bald head. Adult birds have white heads with a black band from the eye to the base of the bill that continues in a sort of mustache hanging from either side of the bill. The rest of the bird is dark gray, brown, and cream-colored. No, I mean the bearded vulture actually rubs soil and dust containing ferrous oxide on its body to stain the feathers a rusty red, apparently because it just likes the way it looks. In fact, researchers think the color is a status symbol. A bird that has the time and energy to spend hours preening red dirt into its feathers is a bird that has its life nicely sorted. It also indicates to other bearded vultures that the bird has a big territory and knows it well, since the dust bathing is done in secret. But let’s face it, the most metal thing about this bird is what it eats. The rotting flesh of dead animals? Pfft, that’s for other scavengers. Most of the time the bearded vulture doesn’t pay any attention to meat. It just wants the bones. The bearded vulture’s stomach is specialized to digest even large bones in about 24 hours. Bone marrow has a high nutritional content, higher even than muscle tissue, but most animals find it difficult to get to the marrow easily enough to extract the nutrients without more effort than it’s worth. The bearded vulture just picks a bone and either swallows it whole, or, if the bone is too big to swallow, either drops it from a height the same way it does with tortoises or batters it against a rock with its bill until it shatters. But it can swallow bones up to 11 inches long, or 28 cm. Most vultures regurgitate partially digested food for their babies.