Rock star

By Tim Dee

Stone, bone and rust: welcome to the lammergeyer’s world. These huge vultures are at home in the wildest and rockiest of spots: the Pyrenees, the Taurus Mountains, the Himalayas, the Ethiopian Highlands, the Drakensberg of South Africa, and here, on Monte Incudine in the stony heart of Corsica. There aren’t many lammergeyers, yet montane geology defines them so fully that they are a flying emblem for each of these high places.

Lammergeyers are carrion-eating vultures, but unlike their relatives – the textbook scavengers plunging their bald heads into caverns of gore – they prefer the bones of dead mountain mammals. The lammergeyer’s stomach juices, more acidic than many car batteries, can break down hocks and calcified haunches within a day or so. But it will often hasten its meal with a more graphic style of butchery: it hoicks bones aloft, carrying skeletons in its beak or talons, and drops them from a height of 100 metres or so onto exposed slabs or anvils of rock.