Fact checking

Yesterday's Guardian had a piece about the successful breeding of a pair of bearded vultures in northern Spain, a bird being brought back from the verge of extinction there. A bird which is, I believe, still common in its ancestral homelands of central Asia, the Himalayas and northern India. From where I associate to the rare bird which is the mascot of the RSPB in Scotland, possibly the avocet, common as dirt in Russia. Or something of the sort.

According to the Guardian, this vulture makes part of its living from dropping bones from a great height to as to shatter them and make the marrow accessible. Which struck me as rather unlikely: I couldn't imagine that dropping a bone - say of a small sheep - would shatter it. Possibly break it, but not shatter. And dropping an entire animal, with all that live weight of water, is likely to do some damage. But here we are talking of bones.

Consulting Wikipedia, the Guardian story is corroborated - although it may well be that that is exactly where the Guardian got its information from. These vultures can fly up with surprisingly large bones - perhaps weighing several kilos - and the repeated dropping of a bone of that size might well cause enough damage. An unusual bird in that most of its diet is bone and bone marrow; not keen on flesh at all.

PS: for some reason, Windows will not update the thumbnail of the snap above in the folder into which I copied it. Thumbnail remains that of the image illustrating the post at reference 2. Both confusing and curious.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearded_vulture.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/brexit-dividend.html.