Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Bonecrusher

No, not a wrassler, but a great bird. I watched a PBS special that had this video of this bird dropping bones onto the rocks & then retrieving them for the marrow. It was one of those moments that joined many others in a file that showed humans are not the only thinking creatures on this planet. A tool using bird, I thought at the time, very cool.
Europe's immense bearded vulture, sometimes called the "bone crusher," boasts a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, plucks meals from avalanche debris, and breeds its chicks in the subzero temperatures of the wintertime Alps. Its gastric juices register a "1" on the pH scale, nearly pure acid. Seething belly bile is a necessity for a creature that subsists mainly on weather-bleached bones.
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Bone crushers are not especially amorous birds. The vultures are even more finicky about sex than food. They don't reach breeding age until age 5 or older, late for most bird species. They don't care much for one another's company, preferring lives of extreme solitude. They wheel in search of death over aggressively defended individual territories that typically cover 200 square miles of rugged range.
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"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," Frey said.
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The bearded vultures lays eggs in mid winter in nests high above the tree line and densely insulated with tufts of wool plucked from the carcasses of mountain goats. The chicks hatch in March, just as receding drifts in Alpine meadows yield an abundance of winter's victims "packed in the snow like so many raisins in a pudding," as Frey put it. "This time of death for so many species is the time of plenty for the vulture."

2 comments:

BurdockBoy said...

Doesn't sound like a very happy bird-almost pure acid in its stomach, searching for death, little sex, prefers to be alone in extremely cold temps. Kinda snaps me out of my depression.

Anonymous said...

The story of Aeschelus might be of interest. "Beware the fall of a house" RLK