The heights of the cliffs and canyons of the Andes is where to spot these mighty creatures
Mike Dilger’s WILDLIFE SPECTACLES The broadcaster, naturalist and tour guide shares the most breathtaking seasonal events in the world
SOARING ANDEAN CONDORS
Animal superlatives always excite the enquiring mind. Questions such as what is the biggest, smallest, longest and fastest have long been a staple of the pub quiz. If record-breakers are your bag, then the Andean condor – both the heaviest bird of prey and the raptor with the longest wingspan – needs little introduction.
With a wingspan (for the record) maxing out at around 3.2m, and weighing up to 15kg, adult Andean condors have principally dark plumage and black primaries, or ‘fingers’, which contrast to their startlingly white secondary flight feathers and white ‘fluffy’ neck collar. They also possess naked, fleshy heads, presumably a hygienic adaptation that allows them to delve into animal carcasses without their plumage becoming overly soiled by innards.
Andean condors are the only New World vulture to display sexual dimorphism. The bigger males have a large, dark red comb, or caruncle, on the crown of the head, that surely plays a key role when the time comes for this sexually monogamous species to find its life-partner.
As masters in the art of effortless soaring, it is up in the air where condors excel. Using a combination of wind gusts, currents of warm rising air and streams of air pushed upwards by cliffs and mountains, condors are able to spend hours on the wing, in a perennial hunt for carrion. So efficient is this
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So natural is the Andean condor’s soaring that one bird was found to have flown for five hours, covering a distance of 160km, without once flapping its wings.
technique that equipment recently strapped to condors in Patagonia revealed that only one per cent of the birds’ time aloft is spent flapping their wings – with this mostly occurring during take-off.
Searching far and wide for food, condors use their razor-sharp eyesight to find a meal directly, or to locate large congregations of smaller raptors and scavengers, which invariably indicate a carcass. They most commonly feed on large carrion, with their food of choice historically being llamas, guanacos and rheas, but as these species have been displaced by farm animals, attention has shifted to cows, h
