Ruppell's Griffon Vulture

About the Rüppell's griffon vulture

Rüppell's vulture, also called Rüppell's griffon vulture or simply Rüppell's griffon, is a large bird of prey named after the naturalist Eduard Rüppell. It's mainly native to the Sahel region and East Africa, and it holds a striking record: it is considered the highest-flying bird, with confirmed evidence of a flight at 11,300 meters, or about 37,000 feet, an altitude where the average temperature runs around minus 56 degrees Celsius (minus 69 Fahrenheit). That record comes from a grim data point — a Rüppell's vulture was confirmed to have collided with an aircraft engine over Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on November 29, 1973, at that same altitude.

Adults measure 85 to 103 cm (33 to 41 in) long, with a wingspan of 2.26 to 2.6 m (7 ft 5 in to 8 ft 6 in) and a weight ranging from 6.4 to 9 kg (14 to 20 lb), noticeably larger than the closely related white-backed vulture with which it often shares habitat. The sexes look alike: mottled brown or black overall, with a whitish-brown underbelly and thin, dirty-white fluff covering the head and neck. A white collar marks the base of the neck, the eye is yellow or amber, and the crop patch is deep brown. The head is bare of feathers — an adaptation tied to the bird's habit of pushing its head deep inside a carcass to feed, which would otherwise make feeding extremely messy. The species is largely silent, but becomes vocal, squealing heavily, at the nest and around a carcass. Rüppell's vultures also carry a specialized variant of the hemoglobin alphaD subunit that binds oxygen especially well, letting them function in the thin air of the upper troposphere where they commonly fly as high as 6,000 m (20,000 ft).

Behavior and diet

In the air, Rüppell's vulture typically cruises at about 35 km/h (22 mph) and can spend 6 to 7 hours aloft each day. Under good soaring conditions it can reach up to 45 km/h during cross-country flight and 70 to 85 km/h in a straight glide, and it will travel well over 100 km (62 mi) from its nest to find food — occasionally as far as 200 km (120 mi) when riding favorable updrafts.

The species is a strict carrion feeder that follows game herds on their seasonal migrations and gathers in large numbers at carcasses, typically alongside other Old World vulture species. It will take advantage of a kill left by a lion or another large predator, but just as often feeds on animals that died of injury, disease, or old age. Though it prefers freshly killed meat, it can handle older carcasses without trouble. Among Old World vultures it's a particularly specialized feeder: once the softer parts of a carcass are gone, it works through hide and even bone, gorging until it can barely fly, and backward-pointing spikes on its tongue help strip meat from bone. Despite its size and specialized adaptations, it isn't the most dominant vulture at a carcass — that position goes to the larger lappet-faced vulture.

Rüppell's vultures are monogamous and form lifelong pairs. After courtship, a pair builds a nest of sticks, grass, and leaves — sometimes gathered, sometimes stolen from other nests — on cliffs, and in key breeding areas they nest in colonies containing hundreds of pairs. Both parents share incubation of a single egg over about 55 days, then feed and tend the chick for roughly 150 days until it fledges. Young remain dependent on their parents well past fledging, not becoming independent until the next breeding season, during which time they learn to find and compete for food. Because of the large area needed to find enough carrion, a pair can only raise one chick at a time.

The species' primary feathers molt continuously throughout its life, typically starting about 10 months after a bird leaves the nest, with a complete molt of all primary feathers taking around three years to finish.

Range and habitat

Rüppell's vulture is native mainly to the Sahel region and East Africa. It has been recorded as a vagrant in Spain and Portugal since 1992, with annual sightings since 1997, mostly around Cádiz and the Strait of Gibraltar but occasionally farther north. In Morocco it is a resident species, and some tagged birds there have been observed overwintering rather than migrating on. Total population is estimated at around 22,000 individuals, distributed across breeding populations in Tanzania (3,000 pairs), Kenya (2,000 pairs), Ethiopia (2,000 pairs), Sudan (2,000 pairs), and West Africa (2,000 pairs).

Conservation status

Rüppell's vulture is listed as Critically Endangered (CR). The IUCN first assessed the species in 1988, and its population has been declining since. It carried a status of Near Threatened from 2007, was uplisted to Endangered between 2012 and 2014, and was reassessed as Critically Endangered in 2015. It's also listed under CITES Appendix II, which regulates international trade without treating the species as at immediate risk of extinction from trade alone, though the current population could become more vulnerable without careful oversight.

The most serious threat identified is poisoning: when predators like lions or hyenas kill livestock, farmers sometimes lace the carcass with carbofuran poison in retaliation, and because vultures find carrion by sight and can draw hundreds of birds to a single carcass, one poisoning event has been documented to kill 37 to 600 individuals. Killing vultures for use in traditional medicine, tied to beliefs that they are clairvoyant or can boost a child's intelligence, has also contributed heavily to the decline. Other pressures include habitat loss from human land use, loss of nesting sites, and shrinking food availability. In Morocco, the Moroccan Association for the Protection of Birds and Wildlife has partnered with the National Agency for Water and Forests since 2020 at a vulture rehabilitation center to support the species and encourage birdwatching in the Jbel Moussa Protected Area. Establishing protected wildlife areas is thought to be an effective way to protect the species, and since detection rates for Rüppell's vultures have been found to be lower inside protected areas than outside them, extending protection to key breeding sites in Kenya and Tanzania could help support the population.