By Pablo Goicolea Ruigomez
During my military service in Spain back in the 80’s, I was, so to say, “lucky” to be destined to the High Mountain Skiers corpse in Rioseta, near the Candanchú ski resort in the Pyrenees.
I remember clearly the moments when we were standing still in formation, with frostbite in our ears waiting for the morning review. No one dared to move, but I would somehow manage to glimpse to the sky to distract myself from the fact that it was freezing, always keeping my head looking front. Most of the times I looked, I would see a silhouette flying near el Pico Del Águila – a peak nearby, elegant as I had never seen before. Day after day, the same scene, it came out despite the snow, the stray wind currents, the storms, defying all the elements. It looked like an eagle but it flew like a vulture. I could not quite figure out what it was, so when I had the chance, I did a little research in a Bird’s book. This bird has an unmistakeable diamond-like tail with slim wings like a golden eagle.
It was the Quebrantahuesos, literally translated the “Bonebreaker”, technically the Gyapetus Barbatus, and the Beard Vulture in English. It was a rare species of Vulture that almost led to extinction in Europe, where there are only a few couples left, spread around the Pyrenees. Luckily, in the past years the population has been recovering, and some couples have been introduced in the Alps, in Picos de Europa and in Sierra Nevada, where they were already extinct.
Its name comes from its unusual diet. It feeds almost exclusively of bones from other dead animals. It is the only bird which does this, it occupies the last place in the food chain, and it only eats when all the other scavengers have finished. This is why, while most of the vultures have bold head and long necks, this one has feathered head, a short neck with a distinctive feather which looks like a beard and a mask over its eyes.
The Quebrantahuesos can swallow whole bones up to 20cm, but when bones are bigger, it uses a curious mechanism to break them in smaller pieces. It grabs the bones with its peak and starts flying high up in the sky, it looks for a big rock and, when it finds it, it lets the bones fall with the marksmanship of an archer and they break when they make contact with the rock.
I hope I have woke up your curiosity enough so that when we are in the Pyrenees, you can’t help but look up to the sky to see if you are the lucky one who find this amazing bird. If you do see it, please stop and contemplate its magnificence, it is worth the while.
