2023-06-16 05:43:00
The vultures are back in Belgium. The bearded vulture is a fairly rare species to observe since these scavengers usually live in southern countries. How to explain that they are present among us?
A huge wild raptor, cousin of vultures, was photographed in Forest this Saturday, June 10. Measuring up to 3 meters in wingspan and weighing 7 kilos, this bird is a bearded vulture. This scavenger is not, however, a regular in our skies: it comes from the mountains of southern Europe. Wildlife photographer Vincent Legrand was surprised to see it hover. “It’s not common, it’s even quite exceptional to see them and see them pass”he says. “But there are some every year in Belgium.”
Where one should be surprised is that the raptor originating from Central Asia and the Middle East, is present in Europe only in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and Crete. “It’s a Mediterranean species that is not supposed to fly here. We should only have two or three occurrences of different birds, at most”, agrees the Brussels photographer, who has been tracking rarities for 30 years.
But how did this bearded vulture come to Forest? Didier Vangeluwe, ornithologist at the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences provides a scientific explanation. “The vultures had been almost exterminated from France. Reintroduction programs were developed from the mid to late 1980s. From the moment they returned to France and it worked, gradually they were came to us”he says. “They need warm air. When we observe them here, it’s not at all that they will settle tomorrow or the day following tomorrow, but the population having redeployed and having built up fairly strong numbers , they are nomads for several years and these hot winds carry them for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers.
So, if you want to observe these large bearded vultures, all you have to do (maybe) is to look up in the sky of Brussels.
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