A beauty, make no bones about it

My youngest son, currently teaching in Spain, had the good fortune to be invited to a lammergeyer-watching weekend in the Pyrenees.

Lammergeyers are enormous birds, similar to vultures. They have a wingspan of up to eight and a half feet. Quebranta-huesos, they are called in Spanish, meaning ‘breaker of bones’. They carry the larger bones of dead animals aloft and drop them onto rocks so that they shatter and are edible. The bones and marrow are a staple food source for these birds, living, as they do, in remote mountains and surviving on carrion, the corpses of deer, goats and sheep.

In flight, lammergeyers are magnificent to watch. My son and his companions – veterinarians and colleagues of his girlfriend at a research institute – were thrilled to see them flying high above the Pyrenean peaks, some still snow-covered, some already greening into mountain meadows. In time, they drifted down, first over the foothill forests and then low over their heads, birds with wingspans broad enough to blot out the sun.