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.

Lars Jonsson, doyen of field guide writers, says in his Birds of Europe (Helm Books) “Mostly (the lammergeyer is) seen circling around the top of a mountain or leisurely patrolling a mountainside. The sight of it is majestic and often overwhelming. It moves along a mountainside in slow motion with few movements.”

Also called Bearded Vultures, lammergeyers prefer bones to meat: bones provide 15% more energy. They have exceptionally strong stomach acids and the lower end of the bone is dissolving even as the top end is being gulped down. A single lammergeyer can digest an entire cow’s vertebra in two days. Griffon vultures and Egyptian vultures take care of the skin and meat. A very useful job they all do, in a region where knacker’s yards are nowhere near.

Notwithstanding their usefulness, by 1988 the number of pairs breeding in the Aragon Pyrenees had fallen to 40. Poisoned meat – ostensibly laid to kill foxes – was responsible. However, ignorance may have sometimes moved the hand to set the trap, as in Kerry where White Tailed Sea Eagles have been – some say, systematically – poisoned. ‘Lammergeyer’ comes from the German, meaning ‘lamb-vulture’ and old wives’ tales held that lammergeyers would take lambs, and even children.. While such folklore has been discredited by scientific fact and breeding pairs now exceed 80, nevertheless there have been 20 cases of poisoning recorded since 1990.

Another fanciful story was that lammergeyers were partial to the flesh of climbers who, when scaling precipices, would be knocked off by the birds and fall to their deaths. This was nonsense, of course; these birds eat carrion only. Another legend says the great Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise dropped on his head by a lammergeyer; it mistook his bald pate for a stone.

The breeding success of lammergeyers in Spain has been due to education and conservation. Cases of poisoning are rigorously investigated and prosecutions brought. Here in Ireland, efforts to reintroduce the white-tailed sea eagle, the golden eagle and the red kite have all been threatened by poisoned carcasses on the land. Many sheep farmers strongly opposed the re-introductions. With a total of seven sea eagles poisoned in south Kerry since their release 20 months ago, some conservationists suspect the deaths are not accidental. As a result, one charity may suspend bringing in more sea eagles from Norway.

Meanwhile, lammergeyer viewing draws a regular stream of conservationists, birdwatchers and visitors to the remote Pyrenees. It also brings income: my son’s group numbered 20 and they stayed two nights. Eagles on Scotland’s Isle of Mull bring an estimated e3m a year. Eagles and kites in Kerry, Wicklow and Donegal could do the same. Clearly, stricter laws controlling poisons must be enacted, and rigorously enforced.