Summary: <p>This week we look at a couple of unusual vultures, the bearded vulture and the Egyptian vulture. Thanks to Maureen J. who recommended this week’s topic!</p> <p>The bearded vulture, badass bird:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-370" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/bearded-vulture-bird-pictures-300x197.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="197"></p> <p>This bearded vulture is probably thinking about eating bones right now:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-371" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/abeardedvulture-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300"></p> <p>The Egyptian vulture cares about its appearance:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-369" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Egyptianvulture-300x240.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="240"></p> <p><strong>Show transcript:</strong></p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>Halloween is over, we’re all pretty sick of candy, and it’s time to move on to something besides monsters. Something that is not associated with Halloween candy in any way, preferably. I ate, like, three bags of gummy spiders by myself this year.</p> <p>Special thanks to Maureen J. who recently made several topic recommendations. One of her suggestions in particular is taking me down various research rabbit holes, which is a lot of fun but means it’ll be a while before that episode is ready. So in the meantime let’s learn about one of her other suggested topics, vultures.</p> <p>Vultures are divided into two big groups, old world and new world vultures. The two groups are related, but not closely. Today we’re only looking two old world vultures, and in fact, let’s start with a bird that’s considered an old world vulture but is actually not any more closely related to them than the new world vultures are. That’s the bearded vulture.</p> <p>The bearded vulture lives in the high mountains in parts of Asia, Africa, and southern and eastern Europe, and like other vultures it spends a lot of its time waiting for animals to die or just looking for already-dead animals that it can eat. Unlike most other vultures it often gets impatient and cuts out the waiting part by hunting small animals. It especially likes tortoises. Like golden eagles, the bearded vulture will scoop up a tortoise, carry it way way up high, and drop it. Then it coasts down and eats the smashed tortoise. There are stories that the bearded vulture will also sometimes attack larger prey with its wings, driving the animal over a cliff where it plunges to its death. This is a hardcore bird.</p> <p>To add to the general air of all bearded vultures secretly being members of Norwegian death metal bands, they also wear corpse makeup. I don’t mean the bird’s ordinary coloring, although it is pretty impressive. Unlike other vultures, it doesn’t have a bald head. Adult birds have white heads with a black band from the eye to the base of the bill that continues in a sort of mustache hanging from either side of the bill. The rest of the bird is dark gray, brown, and cream-colored. No, </p>
