The bird on the coats of arms and coins of the Andes is a vulture. The Andean condor, with a wingspan that can reach 10 feet 10 inches, belongs to the same family as the turkey vulture circling over a North American highway.
It lives on carrion, and it is very good at it. Wild birds may cover more than 120 miles in a day looking for a carcass. The red, almost bald head is kept scrupulously clean, and the bare skin gets a daily dose of drying air and high-altitude ultraviolet light.
A vulture, but not that kind
Here the family tree gets strange. The world has two groups of birds called vultures, and they are not close relatives. The seven New World species, five vultures and two condors, live only in the Americas. The vultures of Africa, Asia and Europe evolved separately and arrived at the same look and the same job. Biologists call that convergent evolution: bald heads and iron stomachs turned out to be a winning design twice.
The differences show up once you look past the silhouette. A condor’s foot has long toes and fairly straight, blunt talons, so it walks well and grips badly. Unable to carry food away, the bird has to eat on the ground. It also has no syrinx, the organ other birds sing with, which leaves the family with grunts and hisses.
The 1% flapper
Charles Darwin once watched condors for half an hour without seeing a single wingbeat. Flight recorders have since put a number on his hunch: the birds flap “just 1% of the time during flight,” with three quarters of that effort spent getting off the ground.
Run the sum on a five-hour day in the air: 5 hours is 300 minutes, and 1% of 300 is three minutes of flapping. Everything else is rising air off sun-warmed ground and cliff faces. The breastbone is too small to anchor huge flight muscles, so a bird weighing up to 33 pounds depends on soaring.
Its appetite has an awkward side effect. A condor may fast for days, then eat so much that it cannot take off.
Pumas lose their dinners
A scavenger sounds harmless until you meet its neighbors. In Patagonia, researchers found that condors routinely took over puma kills, often the day after the big cat brought down its prey. The pumas appear to kill more often to make up the loss.
Among rival scavengers, rank is signaled in color. A dominant male’s neck can flush from dull red to bright yellow within seconds at a carcass. Those pigments come partly from plant matter in the guts of dead grazers, which is the likely reason zoo birds on a meat-only diet carry less of them.
Long lives, slow numbers
A male nicknamed Thaao, hatched in captivity in 1930, lived at a Connecticut zoo until January 26, 2010. At 79, he reached the greatest verified age on record for a bird.
That slow pace of life is the species’ weakness. Condors do not breed until five or six, usually raise one chick every second year, and cannot absorb many losses. The IUCN moved the species from Near Threatened to Vulnerable in 2020. Current estimates run to about 10,000 birds in total, and at most 6,700 mature adults.
Keepers rearing chicks for release feed them with glove puppets shaped like adult condors, so the young birds never learn to trust people. The first captive-bred Andean condors went back to the wild in 1989.
Further reading
Image: pululante, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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