The results are unsurprising in one sense, as they found (and we already knew) that these birds soar by using thermals-warm rising air-as well as winds blown upwards when they contact mountain peaks (updrafts).
Here’s a bird being tagged (two photos below from The Conversation piece)
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The data collected was so copious-320 pieces per second, that they couldn’t record it in real time, but had to recover the boxes from the roosting sites and download the data that way.
The authors caught juvenile condors by luring them down with sheep carcasses, and than affixing clever electronic boxes to the birds, boxes that were designed to fall off after a few days when they were roosting.
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You can read the PNAS paper for free by clicking on the screenshot below the pdf is here, and full reference at bottom.Īnd, at The Conversation, one of the authors, Emily Shepard, describes the study in layperson’s terms (click on screenshot). You can see one desultory wing flap 36 seconds in, and another at 2:20. First, have a look at the soaring behavior of this bird in a 2½-minute video. The results are quite amazing: they hardly every flap their wings except when taking off. The condor is a denizen of the Andes and a carrion eater, now favoring large dead animals like cows and cattle, though before humans arrived it certainly feasted on the carcasses of native herbivores like guanacos.Ī new paper in PNAS (see below) gives data obtained by affixing electronic devices to eight condors, devices that recorded their altitude, whether they flapped their wings (measured by an accelerometer), and how far they traveled using an included GPS. Wikipedia notes that its wingspan is “exceeded only by the wingspans of four seabirds and water birds-the roughly 3.5 m (11 ft 6 in) maximum of the wandering albatross, southern royal albatross, great white pelican and Dalmatian pelican”. Their mean weight is 11.3 kg (25 lb), with males weighing about a kg more than females. The Andean Condor ( Vultur gryphus) is a bird with one of the longest wingspans in the world-about 3.3 meters, or 10 feet 10 inches.
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