Andean Condor

About the Andean condor

The Andean condor is a South American New World vulture and the only living member of the genus Vultur. It's found along the Andes mountains and the adjacent Pacific coasts of western South America. With a maximum wingspan of 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in) and a weight of up to 15 kg (33 lb), it's one of the largest flying birds on Earth and is generally considered the largest bird of prey in the world.

The adult condor is mostly black, with a ruff of white feathers circling the base of the neck and, especially in males, large white patches on the wings that appear only after the bird's first molt. The head and neck are nearly bare of feathers and colored a dull red that can flush and change with the bird's mood — a visible signal to other condors nearby. Males carry a dark red comb, or caruncle, on the crown of the head and a wattle hanging from the neck; they also have yellower skin than females. Unusually for a bird of prey, the female is the smaller sex. Juveniles look quite different from adults: grayish-brown overall, with a blackish head and neck and a brown ruff.

By weight, the Andean condor is the heaviest living flying bird, ahead of the trumpeter swan and the Dalmatian pelican, and only the great albatrosses and the two largest pelican species exceed it in wingspan. Overall body length runs 100 to 130 cm (3 ft 3 in to 4 ft 3 in), with a wing chord of 75.7 to 85.2 cm (29.8 to 33.5 in) and a tail of 33 to 38 cm (13 to 15 in). Its feet tell a different story than its size might suggest: the middle toe is greatly elongated but the talons on every toe are comparatively straight and blunt, built for walking rather than for grasping prey the way a hawk's or eagle's talons are. The beak, by contrast, is sharply hooked and well suited to tearing at rotting meat.

Behavior and diet

The Andean condor is a scavenger that lives almost entirely on carrion, and its flight reflects that lifestyle. It soars with its wings held horizontally and the primary feathers at the wingtips bent upward, relying on thermals rather than continuous flapping to stay aloft — flight recorders show that 75% of a condor's wingbeats happen around takeoff, and that it flaps its wings just 1% of the time it spends in the air. Charles Darwin once wrote of watching condors for half an hour without seeing a single wingbeat. Condors also practice urohidrosis, emptying their cloaca onto their own legs and feet, which leaves the legs streaked with a white buildup of uric acid. Within larger groups there's a defined social hierarchy, or pecking order, generally topped by mature males.

Condors range widely in search of food, often traveling more than 200 km (120 mi) a day. Inland, they favor the largest available carcasses — historically llamas, alpacas, guanacos, rheas, and deer, though most inland condors today feed mainly on livestock such as cattle, horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats, as well as introduced species like wild boar and red deer. Condors along the coast rely instead on beached carcasses, mostly of cetaceans, and some limit their foraging to just a few kilometers of shoreline where the food supply is reliable. They locate carrion by sight or by following other scavengers, including smaller Cathartes vultures that hunt by smell; because those birds can't tear through tough hides as effectively as a condor can, the two often end up depending on each other at a carcass. The condor is dominant over other scavengers wherever the two overlap, and in Patagonia, researchers found condors routinely commandeering pumas' kills, apparently driving the cats to hunt more often as a result.

Condors reach sexual maturity at five or six years old and are believed to mate for life. Courtship includes an elaborate display: the male's neck flushes from dull red to bright yellow and inflates as he approaches the female with his neck outstretched, hissing, before extending his wings, standing erect, and clicking his tongue; hopping and dancing displays are also part of the ritual. A single bluish-white egg, weighing about 280 g (9.9 oz), is typically laid every other year, hatching after 54 to 58 days of incubation shared by both parents. Chicks are covered in grayish down, fly at around six months, and continue roosting and hunting with their parents until about age two, when they're displaced by a new clutch.

Range and habitat

The Andean condor is found in the Andes and the Santa Marta Mountains, with its present range beginning in Venezuela and Colombia — where it's now extremely rare — and continuing south through Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, through Bolivia and western Argentina to Tierra del Fuego. Its historic range was considerably larger: in the early 19th century it bred all the way from western Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego along the entire Andean chain, before human activity sharply reduced that footprint.

Its habitat is mostly open grassland and alpine terrain up to 5,000 m (16,000 ft) in elevation. Condors favor relatively open, non-forested country that lets them spot carrion from the air, such as high-altitude páramo or rocky mountain terrain generally. The species occasionally ranges down into lowlands in eastern Bolivia, northern Peru, and southwestern Brazil, descends into lowland deserts in Chile and Peru, and is also found over southern-beech forest in Patagonia, where meadows that support herbivores, along with cliffs suited to nesting and roosting, shape where condors settle.

Conservation status

The Andean condor is classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN. It's threatened by habitat loss and by secondary poisoning from lead ammunition left in carcasses killed by hunters, which condors then ingest while scavenging. The bird carries deep cultural significance across its range — it's a national symbol of Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, and figures prominently in Andean folklore and mythology. Captive breeding programs have been established in several countries to support wild populations.