Bearded Vulture

Bearded Vulture: Species Facts

Range & Habitat

The bearded vulture is a scavenger that specialises in feeding on the bone remains of domestic and wild hoofed animals. According to Spain's 2025 national strategy for the species, its world range is limited to mountain habitats with rock cliffs and with free-ranging livestock or wild ungulates, from southern Europe, the Caucasus and Africa to the Indian subcontinent and Tibet.^[1]

The species page of Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park says bones are thought to make up 90 % of its food, so at a carcass it is more spectator than actor, watching the other scavengers prepare its meal. Bones too large to swallow it breaks by dropping them from the air onto breaking sites not far from the nest. The same page says it once nested in any range with a ledge, cave or overhang where it could build.^[6]

In the Iberian Peninsula the species was once found in the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian Mountains, the Iberian and Central Systems, Sierra Morena and the Baetic ranges. In the second half of the 20th century it was confined to the Pyrenees and to Andalusia, where the last bird disappeared in 1986. The 2025 national strategy describes today's Pyrenean breeding population as the largest in the European Union, concentrated mostly in the central part of the Spanish Pyrenees. In Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park, the Gobierno de Aragón's 2022 annual report lists the bearded vulture first among the park's notable fauna.^[1][5]

Spain's 2025 national strategy gives figures for the 2022/2023 breeding season from the national bearded vulture working group, which includes the regional governments and MITECO: 162 territorial units in Spain, 104 of them breeding units that laid and began incubating, and 35 chicks fledged. The Pyrenees as a whole (Spain, France and Andorra) held 198 territorial units, 144 of them on the Spanish side: 88 in Aragón, 48 in Catalonia and 8 in Navarre. Outside the Pyrenees, Andalusia held 11 territorial units and Picos de Europa, in Asturias and Cantabria, 3.^[1]

A more recent count comes from the Fundación para la Conservación del Quebrantahuesos (FCQ), which has carried out the inventory and monitoring of breeding in Aragón every year since 1995. Its 2025 report gives 170 breeding units in Spain, which fledged 38 chicks, and 209 across the Pyrenees including France and Andorra. In Aragón it counted 97 known territories in 2025, 93 of them breeding units (65 pairs and 28 trios); 31 chicks hatched there and 21 fledged. The FCQ puts the growth of the Aragonese population at 3.4 % a year over 1988–2025.^[2]

Earlier figures, for the record: the Spanish Pyrenean population became known in the late 1970s, with about 29 pairs from Navarre to Lleida (1979), and a first census of the whole southern side of the range in the 1980s counted 40 pairs. In 1995 the Aragonese Pyrenees held 35 breeding units, according to the FCQ. The 2025 national strategy says Aragón's breeding population grew by an average of 6.4 % a year between 1988 and 2023, from 27 to 88 territorial units, and the whole Pyrenean population from 45 controlled territories in 1988 to 198 in 2023, though the yearly increase has slowed. It estimated the Pyrenean population at around 1,000 birds in 2016 (range 937–1,119), of which some 750 were adults and only 365 were breeders.^[1][2]

Threats

Illegal poisoning. Spain's 2025 national strategy names human disturbance and poisoning through the illegal use of poison, usually aimed at killing carnivores that come into conflict with livestock farming, as the most prominent threats today. Poisoned bait is illegal. A study cited by the strategy put poisoning at 26 % of the bearded vulture's mortality in western Europe, a cause the strategy considers greatly underestimated; it says around ten bearded vultures a year could be poisoned, of which only a small share would be detected. The Pyrenees suffered two major poisoning episodes, in 1997–1998 (six birds) and 2001–2002 (eight), and finds of poisoned birds there have fallen in recent years.^[1]

Electrocution and collision. Bearded vultures spend most of their time flying at fairly low heights, which makes them very susceptible to collisions with power lines, cable-car cables and wind turbines. The 2025 national strategy records 24 deaths on power lines in Spain between 1987 and 2022 (13 by electrocution and 11 by collision). In 2024 a bird released in the Maestrazgo of Teruel died after colliding with a wind turbine, the first such case recorded in Spain, and the strategy warns that the large expansion of wind farms could become a threat. It calls for dangerous existing power lines to be modified and marked.^[1]

Food supply and sanitary rules on carcasses. The species depends on abundant wild ungulates and on extensive livestock farming. According to the 2025 national strategy, the sanitary rules requiring dead animals to be traced and removed have in the past meant a drastic reduction in available food and could do so again; collection of carcasses was required between 2002 and 2011, coinciding with the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The strategy links the removal of carcasses, together with other threats, to later laying, smaller clutches, lower breeding success and lower survival. It asks for every area of current or potential range where some free-ranging livestock remains to be designated as a feeding zone for scavenging birds (ZPAEN) under Real Decreto 1632/2011, so that farmers can be authorised to leave carcasses in the hills.^[1]

Human disturbance. The 2025 national strategy identifies disturbance by people as the main, often avoidable, cause of breeding failure. Particularly harmful are high levels of noise, from helicopters, hunting drives or forestry work, and activity very close to nests, by photographers, drones, climbers or paragliders.^[1]

Unintended poisoning. The 2025 national strategy also records poisoning that was not intended, including lead poisoning from fragments of lead ammunition swallowed with carcasses, and calls for lead ammunition to stop being used for big-game hunting in Spain before the end of 2027.^[1]

Disease and a slowing Pyrenean population. Avian influenza (H5N1) could markedly reduce the species' productivity, as the 2025 national strategy says was seen in 2022 in the central and western Pyrenees, with at least three chicks more than 60 days old dead. As the Pyrenean population grew, breeding success and productivity fell steadily, so the number of chicks fledged each year has stayed almost constant despite the rise in territories; the strategy says this suggests the population may be close to the carrying capacity of the Pyrenees.^[1]

Conservation Status & Work

Gypaetus barbatus: Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List (global assessment of the species, published in 2021).^[8]

In Spain the bearded vulture is listed in the category «en peligro de extinción» (in danger of extinction) in the Catálogo Español de Especies Amenazadas (Real Decreto 139/2011). Aragón's catalogue (Decreto 129/2022) also lists it as «en peligro de extinción», as do those of Catalonia, Navarre, the Basque Country, Andalusia, the Valencian Community and La Rioja. Internationally it is listed in Annex I of the EU Birds Directive and in Appendix II of the Bern Convention.^[7][1]

The Strategy for the Conservation of the Bearded Vulture in Spain and Portugal was approved by Spain's Conferencia Sectorial de Medio Ambiente on 13 February 2025, revising the first strategy of 2000. Its aim is for the species to reach a favourable conservation status in the Iberian Peninsula before 2030, and one of its targets is to cut cases of poisoning by at least half in the 2030s compared with the 2010s. Recovery plans are the responsibility of the regional governments; Aragón's plan was approved by Decreto 45/2003.^[1]

Egg rescue and rearing in human isolation. Eggs are rescued only from Pyrenean breeding units with a record of continued breeding failure, under a protocol of the national bearded vulture working group; in 2025 the Gobierno de Aragón authorised rescues in 24 units and eggs were recovered from 8. The chicks are incubated and first reared in human isolation at the bearded vulture rescue and breeding centre (CRIAH) at La Alfranca, owned by the Gobierno de Aragón and run by the FCQ. To avoid imprinting on people, the FCQ uses life-size, highly realistic naturalised decoys, or puppets, as the parent figure.^[2][3]

Ordesa's role. After their first weeks the chicks are moved to a field-rearing (hacking) structure in Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park, built beside a supplementary feeding point stocked by park staff. According to the FCQ's 2025 report, 83 chicks were field-reared in the park between 1995 and 2025; 57 were released in the Cantabrian Mountains, 12 in the Central System (Gredos), 10 in the Pyrenees and 2 in the Maestrazgo. In June 2025 the Gobierno de Aragón, signing a new agreement with the FCQ that runs until 2029, said 61 chicks had been reared over the previous ten years at the CRIAH and in the field-rearing area of Escuaín, in the national park, 11 of them in the last year. The park's 2022 annual report records five chicks completing part of their development there that year.^[3][2][4][5]

Reintroduction beyond the Pyrenees. The 2025 national strategy lists the projects under way. In Andalusia, releases began in the Sierra de Cazorla, Segura y Las Villas in 2006, led by the Junta de Andalucía; 90 chicks had been released by 2024, giving a population of about 65 birds with eight breeding pairs in 2023. In Picos de Europa, the FCQ began releases in 2010 with EU LIFE funding; 45 birds had been released by 2023, forming four territorial pairs. In the Maestrazgo of Castellón, a project of the Generalitat Valenciana and the Vulture Conservation Foundation released 17 birds between 2018 and 2024. In January 2022 the European Commission approved the FCQ's LIFE project «Corredores Ibéricos por el Quebrantahuesos», running until the end of 2027, to continue releases in Picos de Europa and begin them in Gredos, where 9 birds had been released by 2024. According to the FCQ, the first chick born in the wild in the Cantabrian Mountains fledged in 2020.^[1][2]

Feeding and monitoring. Under the 2025 agreement the Gobierno de Aragón and the FCQ continue a supplementary feeding programme that supplies 1,000 kg of food a year to ten breeding units, and the Aínsa-Sobrarbe feeding station, which provides 25,000 kg a year for scavenging birds. In 2022, according to the park's annual report, Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park itself monitored the species: supplies to the supplementary feeding point, sightings of marked birds, follow-up of breeding units and radio-tracking.^[4][5]