Andean condor

Name and taxonomy

Carl Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and named it Vultur gryphus. The name has never changed. Vultur is simply the Latin word for a vulture. The second word comes from a Greek word meaning hook-nosed. The English word condor comes from kuntur in Quechua.

People name the bird after their own country across its range. It is called the Bolivian, Chilean, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian or Argentinean condor. Only two birds in the world are commonly called condors. The other is the California condor, a different genus in the same family. This species belongs to the New World vulture family Cathartidae.

Evolution and relatives

New World vultures and Old World vultures look alike and do the same job. They are not close relatives, and each group evolved separately on its own continent. Where the seven New World species belong is still argued over. Older authors linked them to storks, and newer ones keep them near the hawks or give them their own order. iNaturalist places the condor in the order Cathartiformes.

The fossil record for this bird is thin. That is unlike the California condor, which is known from many fossils. Condor bones from the Plio-Pleistocene of South America match the living species. A few small bones from Tarija in Bolivia may belong to a smaller ancient subspecies. No other member of the genus Vultur survives today.

Appearance

The adult is black except for the white neck ruff and the white wing bands. Those wing bands appear only after the bird's first moult. The bare head and neck run from red to almost black. Bare skin dries out easily and sits under strong mountain sunlight, which helps keep it clean. Young birds are greyish brown, with a dark head and a brown ruff.

Weights run from 7.7 to 15 kilograms, and the average is about 10.8 kg. Males average about 12.5 kg and females about 10.1 kg. No other flying bird carries a heavier average weight. The tail measures 33 to 38 centimetres. For sheer span, only the great albatrosses and a pair of pelican species do better.

The middle toe is long and the hind toe barely developed. The talons are straight and blunt, which suits walking rather than seizing prey. The hooked bill tears through hide and rotting meat. Males have a dark red comb on the crown, a wattle on the neck and brown eyes. Females lack the comb and have deep red eyes, and they are smaller than the males.

Habitat and range

The range follows the Andes and the Santa Marta Mountains of South America. It starts in Venezuela and Colombia, where the bird is now very rare. It runs south through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and western Argentina to Tierra del Fuego. In the early nineteenth century the species bred along the whole chain. Human pressure has cut that range back sharply.

Open grassland and alpine ground up to 5,000 metres make up most of the habitat. ADW records birds as high as 5,500 m. The bird needs open country, because it finds food by eye from the air. Rocky slopes and paramo grassland suit it best. It also drops to desert lowlands in Chile and Peru and to beaches for stranded carcasses.

Cliffs matter as much as feeding ground. The bird roosts and nests on ledges and small caves in rock faces. Air rising off those faces carries it aloft with almost no effort. In southern Patagonia the birds follow meadows, because grazing animals die there. Distribution in that region tracks both the meadows and the nearest cliffs.

Diet and feeding

The condor is a scavenger and lives mainly on carrion. It prefers big carcasses and once relied on llamas, guanacos, rheas, deer and armadillos. Livestock has replaced most of that food, so cattle, horses, sheep and goats now feature. Introduced game animals such as wild boar, red deer, rabbits and foxes are eaten too. Coastal birds live largely on dead whales and other marine mammals washed ashore.

Birds may cover more than 200 kilometres in a day while searching. They find food by sight, and they also watch other scavengers. Turkey vultures and yellow-headed vultures track carrion by smell instead. Those smaller birds cannot open a tough hide, so the condor opens the carcass for everyone. Research shows that condors find carrion perfectly well on their own as well.

A condor eats on the ground, because its feet cannot carry food away. It usually opens a body at the rear and works forward, taking the liver first. The birds fast for days and then gorge, sometimes until they cannot take off. In Patagonia condors take over puma kills so often that the cats now kill more to keep up. Plant matter from the gut of a carcass appeared in 90 per cent of droppings in one study.

Behaviour and social life

The condor holds its wings flat in the glide, with the tips of the primaries curled up. It has no deep breastbone, so it cannot power long flapping flight. Flight recorders show that about 75 per cent of all flapping happens at take-off. In the air the bird flaps for only about 1 per cent of the time. Charles Darwin watched condors for half an hour on the Beagle voyage without seeing one flap.

Condors roost together on ledges and shelves, though they do not nest in colonies. As many as 196 birds have been counted at one roost in Patagonia, Argentina. Roosts fill up in summer and autumn. A pecking order runs through the group, with adult males on top and young males at the bottom. Dominant birds take the ledges with the best sun and the best shelter from wind.

Like other New World vultures, the condor empties its cloaca onto its own legs. The habit is called urohidrosis, and it leaves white streaks of uric acid on the skin. Cooling by evaporation is the usual explanation, but the Andean climate is cold already. The birds defend only the ground around the nest, about one kilometre across. Away from the nest they are not territorial.

Communication and senses

Sight does almost all the work for this bird. It picks out a carcass from great height and reads the movements of smaller vultures. It has no syrinx, so it cannot make a proper bird call. It hisses and clicks instead, and a female may moan quietly while mating. Young birds probably beg with the same hissing sounds.

Colour carries the messages that a voice would carry in other birds. Both sexes can flush the bare skin of the head and neck as their mood changes. The skin of a dominant male at a carcass can turn bright in a few seconds. A courting male inflates his neck and drives the colour from dull red to bright yellow. Pigments from plant matter in the gut of carcasses supply that yellow colour.

Reproduction and life cycle

Condors mate for life and start breeding at five or six years old. ADW gives a wider window for first breeding, at 6 to 11 years. A pair may roost at a chosen ledge for two and a half months before mating. The male spreads his wings, arches his neck, hisses and clicks his tongue. The female often mirrors his steps, and the pair nibble at each other and knock their bills together.

Nesting happens on inaccessible rock ledges, mostly between 3,000 and 5,000 metres. Most pairs build nothing, and a few scatter a handful of sticks around the egg. On the Peruvian coast, where cliffs are scarce, some nests are shaded scrapes beside boulders. The single egg is bluish white, weighs about 280 grams and measures 75 to 100 millimetres. A pair usually breeds only every second year, and ADW puts the gap at 2 to 3 years.

Both parents sit on the egg for 54 to 58 days. If the egg is lost, the female lays another to replace it. Breeders use that habit to double output, taking the first egg to rear by hand. The chick is covered in grey down until it is nearly adult size. It flies at six or seven months and stays with its parents until about two years old.

Predators and threats

A healthy adult condor has no natural predator. Eggs and small chicks can be lost to foxes and to large birds when a nest is reachable. Parents display hard at anything that approaches the ledge, including zoo keepers. A cliff nest probably keeps most ground animals away. The species survives on very low adult mortality rather than on high output of young.

That balance makes the bird fragile when people kill adults. Lead is the worst poison, because a condor digests shot from a hunter's carcass. Farmers who believe condors attack livestock have poisoned them for a century. Loss of open foraging ground removes the carcasses the birds depend on. Where food runs short, condors feed on road kill and are struck by cars.

Population and conservation

The IUCN raised the species from Near Threatened to Vulnerable in 2020. About 10,000 birds are thought to remain. The United States added the condor to its endangered species list in 1970. Ecuador rates the bird as endangered inside its own borders, and Chile as near threatened. The northern end of the range is worst hit, and Venezuela has almost none left.

Zoos in North America breed condors and send the young south. Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia have all taken released birds, starting in 1989. Keepers feed chicks with glove puppets shaped like an adult condor. That keeps the chick from treating people as its own kind, which would kill it after release. Birds spend three months in an aviary at the release site and then carry satellite tags.

The species has also served its northern cousin. In 1988 the US Fish and Wildlife Service released Andean condors in California as a trial. Only females went out, so no breeding population could take hold. The trial worked, and every bird was caught again and returned to South America. California condors were then released in their place.

Relationship with humans

Andean people have lived alongside the condor for thousands of years. Farmers today often see it as a pest that harasses their stock. Conservation groups run education programmes to correct that idea. Poisoning has become less common as public feeling for the bird has grown. Some people have hunted condors for their bones and organs, which were held to heal.

The bird brings money as well. Tourists travel to the Andes to watch condors soar along the cliffs. Zoos keep the species because visitors want to see it. Work with captive condors taught keepers how to breed the California condor. iNaturalist holds 8,130 records of the species from across its range.

In culture and myth

Andean art has shown the condor since about 2500 BCE. In Andean belief the bird belonged to the sun and ruled the upper world. In Inca tradition it stood for the heavens, the jaguar for the earth and the snake for the world below. Seen from a nearby peak, the layout of Machu Picchu takes the shape of a condor. A large stone altar there is carved as a bird with its wings raised.

Many Andean cultures treat the condor as a sign of power and health. Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador all name it their national bird. In one form of the Peruvian Yawar Fiesta, a condor is tied to a bull during the fight. The bird pecks at the bull and is usually released alive afterwards. The 1941 novel Yawar Fiesta by Jose Maria Arguedas describes the festival without that condor.

The condor turns up in music, on stamps and on money. Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela have all issued condor stamps. Daniel Alomia Robles wrote El Condor Pasa in 1913 for a Peruvian zarzuela. Paul Simon heard the tune in Paris in 1965, and his recording made it famous worldwide. Peru declared the piece part of its national heritage in 2004.