The Egyptian vulture’s mind is as sharp as its beak (Image: Bernard Castelein/Nature Picture Library/Rex Features)

Species: Neophron percnopterus

Habitat: From southern Europe and north Africa through the Middle East to central Asia and India. They really ought to be called transcontinental vultures

In the summer of 1990, amateur naturalists Nikolai Stefanov and his girlfriend Yva Stoyanova were camping in the Vratsa mountains in north-west Bulgaria when they witnessed Egyptian vultures doing something remarkable.


The couple watched as the birds waited patiently for shepherds and their sheep to vacate enclosures used for shearing before swooping down to gather scraps of wool using twigs held in their beaks.

Three years later, Stefanov and Stoyanova, believed to have been in their late teens or early twenties, were killed in a traffic accident. They had submitted a paper to a journal but it was only a draft and so it was shelved.

Over a decade later, Josef Schmutz of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, the editor who originally received their findings, decided to try to get it published. And this month he succeeded in the Journal of Raptor Research.

Parental vultures

Egyptian vultures are fairly small as vultures go, with a wingspan of about 1.7 metres. Most of their feathers are white , although they often appear a dirty brown colour because they spend so much time on dusty ground.

While the birds are not particularly big, their nests are. Mostly made of twigs and lined with soft materials like hair, rags and wool, they are around 1.5 metres across. They tend to be built in caves high on cliff faces. This helps keep the nestlings safe from most predators, but it is not foolproof: Stefanov and Stoyanova’s only other published study revealed that the nestlings are at risk from other birds of prey, such as golden eagles.

The young couple observed the vultures’ ingenious use of twigs as tools to gather wool for their nests on 17 occasions with at least five individual birds performing the behaviour. After shearing was finished, they would swoop in and sweep the twigs held in their beaks from side to side like a rake to capture the bits of wool.

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On one occasion, they saw a vulture fly through the open window of a building used by a shepherd carrying a bare twig. It emerged 30 seconds later with the twig laden with wool.

The bird then removed the wool and placed it on the roof of the building before going back inside to gather more. After several trips the vulture had a sizeable wool stash, at which point it discarded the twig and took the wool back to its nest.

To help him revise Stefanov and Stoyanova’s draft paper for publication, Schmutz consulted José Donázar of Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain, an authority on Egyptian vultures.

Donázar says that Egyptian vultures are believed to be the only animal known to use twigs in this way. “No one has reported similar behaviour,” he says, though he notes that “other birds use twigs to obtain food”.

Mmm, eggs ‘n’ dung

The birds most famous for using tools are crows and their relatives. However other tool use by Egyptian vultures has been reported.

For example, they sometimes eat eggs – those that live in Africa are particularly fond of ostrich eggs – and will use stones to break open the shells. A vulture trying to break an egg will pick up a stone in its beak and stand proprietorially over the egg. It will then hold the stone up as high as it can, rear its head backwards and throw the stone at the egg as hard as it can. It sometimes takes several attempts, but they get there in the end.

Egyptian vultures also engage in coprophagy, or dung-eating. They eat the dung of hoofed mammals such as cows, sheep and goats. That is possibly because it contains carotenoids, the chemicals that make carrots orange. Eating it gives their faces a conspicuous yellow tinge, which may make them more attractive to potential mates.

There are no more than 42,000 mature Egyptian vultures worldwide. The veterinary drug diclofenac, found in many of the animals the vultures feed on, is poisonous to them and appears to be behind a 35 per cent decline in the Indian population every year since 1999. The European and African populations are also in steep decline, though in these cases the causes appear to be human interference and a decline in the numbers of large mammals on which they feed.

Journal reference: Journal of Raptor Research, vol 44, p 154

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