Digiscoping Vultures in Extremadura, Spain

On my recent trip to Extremadura, Spain (Europe’s raptor heaven), the Griffon Vultures and Eurasian Black Vultures absolutely enthralled us with their antics, their fly-bys and just how they are in the air. We spent hours admiring them, and we must have taken many thousands of digiscoped photos of them between the two of us. To put it in context, Extremadura is a region in southwestern Spain, between Madrid and Portugal, dominated by open oak dehesas (oak savannas) and open grassland steppes.

Griffon Vulture soaring past the breeding rock face. Digiscoped with Swarovski STM80 HD, TLS800 & Canon 7D. (c) Dale Forbes

As is typical of the heavy old world vultures, they tend to sit around a bit in the morning, waiting for the day to warm up, so that they can use the thermals to raise them up in to the air before heading out over the savannas to search for food.

Griffon Vulture on cliff

All of the worlds five ‘super’ vultures, the griffons, typically nest on cliffs. And for good reason; the smallest griffon, the Long-billed Griffon (Indian Vulture Gyps indicus), weighs in at 5.5-6.3kg and both the Himalayan Griffon (Gyps himalayensis) and Eurasian Griffon (Gyps fulvus) can weight up to 13kg! Now that is enormous for a flying bird that needs to cover long distances. By nesting and roosting on cliffs, the big birds can hop off and do not need to strain quite as much to get up in to the air. Mountainous regions typically also have good winds and thermals moving up through them, important for getting lift.

Eurasian Griffons on Crete (Greece) were estimated to have foraging ranges of 240km² around a breeding colony (about 8km at furthest point)(Xirouchakis & Mylonas 2005), but word on the street in western Spain is that you can pretty much see them anyway so keep your eyes up to the sky.

A griffon flew over the moon. Digiscoped

The one morning we headed out early to the Castillo de Monfragüe, so that we could catch the moon setting and hopefully get some nice light on the vultures as they started to take off in the morning, trying to use some of the morning winds on the mountains to get some lift. With all those vultures about, it really was a digiscoper’s dream.

Griffon Vultures catching dawn winds over the picturesque Castillo de Monfragüe, Extremadura, Spain.

Every now and again, one of the tree-nesting Eurasian Black Vulture would come by for a visit. They have a very different flight profile and have a rather menacing face. We saw lots of Black Vultures during the week, but usually singly or in twos, and not in the larger conglomerations in which we often saw the Griffon Vultures. There were lots of sub-adults of both species about, giving a lot of hope for the species in the region.

Eurasian Black Vulture digiscoped with a Swarovski STM80 HD spotting scope, TLS800 & Canon 7D. Dale Forbes

One of the somewhat unexpected things that the vultures would do, is that as they cruised past us, they would look across at us and really stare. They really were staring. At the very least they seemed to be studying us very carefully. Which made for hundreds of photos like the one below.

Griffon Vulture. Monfragüe National Park, Extremadura, Spain. Digiscoped

I have some photos of Stonechats in great light that I also took in Extremadura, on my Alpine Birds blog.

Happy birding,

Dale Forbes