Vultures are large birds – about the same size as an eagle. Vultures are called by a variety of names, including condor in the Americas.
Many people connect vultures with African savannah, mainly because that is where most photographs are from, but you can find large numbers of vultures all over the warmer parts of Asia, Europe and the Americas.
A group of vultures in flight is called a 'kettle', a 'committee' is a group of vultures at rest, while a group of feeding vultures is a 'wake'.
The simple difference between a vulture and an eagle is this: an eagle is mainly a hunter of live animal prey, and that prey will be smaller than itself. A vulture is a scavenger, looking mainly for dead animal carcasses of any size. Vultures rarely attack healthy animals. But they are still both birds of prey because they live on meat.
Dead meat lying in the wild is called carrion. Many vultures have a bald head, with no feathers. It keeps the head clean when feeding on bloody carcasses, but in warm parts of the world it also helps to get rid of body heat.
Animals that are scavengers may not always make a pleasant sight as they rip apart dead carcasses, but they are a vital part of nature's food chains , and begin the process of returning animals to the ground as nutrients so they an be used by future generations. Vultures are fast scavengers, and so help to keep the world cleaner and better free from disease. Otherwise the carcasses would have to wait until flies and bacteria eventually consumed them.
Vultures are not the only fast scavengers. Hyenas and other kinds of dogs are also scavengers. Nor are they the most powerful scavengers. So if a hyena sees a carcass, the vultures have to wait until the hyena moves away. Sometimes vultures have to do this for practical reasons. The hide of a dead elephant is too thick for a vulture to tackle for example.
As with many other animals, vultures do not know where their next meal is coming from, so when they find a carcass, they eat as much as they can, including filling their crops, then sit around waiting for it to be digested. Some of this food is also kept in the crop to feed chicks.
Vulture stomach acid is exceptionally strong, and this is why they eat putrefying meat whose bacteria would, for example, be dangerous for humans to eat.
Like every other living thing, vultures have an important place in the balance of our planet.
