The Alps lost its vultures - then it got them back |
'One of the most successful wildlife comeback stories': The Alps lost its vultures - then it got them back
Decades after its release into the wild, a super-ageing, bone-crunching vulture called Balthazar reveals a major conservation success.
In the autumn of 2025, wildlife experts in the French Alps made a surprising discovery: a frail, weakened bearded vulture found lying on the ground turned out to be Balthazar, a bird released under a conservation programme in 1988, who had vanished from observations. Having been presumed dead, at over 37 years old, he is in fact the oldest bearded vulture ever to have been recorded in the wild.
Over his long life, Balthazar witnessed the return of his own species to Alpine skies and cliffs, as bearded vultures have soared back from local extinction.
Bearded vultures are majestic, cliff-nesting birds with wing spans of 2.5m (8.2ft) or more, about the size of a flying door. Their diet is one of their many intriguing features: they are thought to be the only animal that is ossivorous, meaning, they feed mainly on bones.
The Spanish name for bearded vulture, quebrantahuesos (bone-breaker), in fact hints at the complex acrobatics this diet involves. The birds scavenge bones from carcasses, then drop them onto rocks from a great height to smash them into smaller pieces. They often have favourite bone-breaking sites, known as ossuaries, close to their nests.
These bone-smashing birds used to roam the mountains of southern Europe but were hunted into extinction in the Alps and were last seen there in the early 1900s, surviving only as tiny wild populations in some other areas of Europe. Beginning in 1986, however, and over a number of decades, conservationists released a total of over 260 bearded vultures bred in captivity into the Alpine regions of Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France and Germany.
Balthazar was among those early releases in the 1980s, and fathered the first chick raised in the wild in the Alps, after the species had been absent for decades. Today, bearded vultures are successfully breeding and raising chicks in the wild again. In 2025, the wild population of bearded vultures in the Alps passed 100 breeding pairs for the first time, to a total of 118. The population is self-sustaining (you can follow some of their awe-inspiring tracked journeys across wild valleys, ridges and rivers on these maps).
"It's a very successful story, a very beautiful story," says José Tavares, the director of the Vulture Conservation Foundation, one of the main organisations behind the reintroduction programme. "It's a huge success, demonstrating that when there is will and a little bit of funding and a little bit of political support, we can actually reverse the loss of biodiversity and achieve fantastic results," Tavares says.
Humans and bearded vultures have an extraordinarily long shared history in Europe. A study of ancient vulture nests in cliff caves in southern Spain, which had been re-used by the birds for generations, found an astonishing range of historical artefacts in them, including a 13th-Century sandal. But that co-existence has also been marked by persecution.
"In the late 19th, early 20th Centuries, there was rampant persecution of bearded vultures in the Alps," says Tavares. He points out that an old German name for the vultures is Lämmergeier, "lamb-vulture", as they were mistakenly........