The griffon vulture
in the Vercors

An adult griffon vulture weighs about as much as a three-year-old child and spreads a wingspan nearly twice as wide as an adult human with arms out. It is the bird you see most often in the Vercors between April and October: 6 to 11 kg of glider riding the thermals without a wing-beat for hours, dropping onto summer-pasture carcasses when an ungulate has not made it through the night. In France, the species has gone from a few dozen pairs in the late 1970s to more than 1,700 today.

Griffon vulture ID card

Wingspan and size of the griffon vulture

2.3 to 2.8 metres of wingspan: that is more than the largest European golden eagle, and well beyond a common buzzard, which tops out around 1.3 m. If you see a bird two to three times bigger than a buzzard circling without flapping, it is a vulture or, more rarely, an eagle.

The wing surface is particularly broad. Each square metre of wing carries about 10 kg of vulture, while a golden eagle works at 6 or 7 kg/m². The griffon is heavily loaded, which ties it to the thermals. It takes off late in the morning, waiting for the sun to heat the ground and start the updrafts. Before 10 am it is still on its ledge. After 11 am it is in the air. That is the time slot we plan for when we go out to watch, because arriving at the col at 9 often means making do with the wind.

In flight: spotting the griffon vulture

Four traits to stack:

• dark belly, pale head: head and upper neck are downy whitish, very visible against the sky;
• wings with spread fingers: separated primaries form well-marked "fingers" at the wingtip;
• short, square tail: very short relative to the body, rounded behind;
• shallow V-shaped flight: wings are held slightly above horizontal, not flat like the cinereous.

The main confusion is with the golden eagle when the bird circles far off and the head is not visible. Rule that worked for us: an eagle flaps, a vulture almost never. If a silhouette spends five minutes in the thermal without a single wing-beat, it is a vulture.

Griffon vulture colonies in Vercors cliffs

The griffon nests on cliffs, in loose colonies of a few pairs to several dozen. There is no known breeding colony in the Vercors proper. The birds seen there come from the cores settled further south: Provençal Baronnies, Diois (cirque d'Archiane), Drôme valley up to Chamaloc. Individuals regularly work their way up to the ridges of the southern Vercors and the Highlands, sometimes as far north as the Molière and Sornin in summer.

As a matter of principle, we do not publish coordinates of active cliffs. That does not stop you from seeing them: birds in flight cover dozens of kilometres from their roost.

Griffon diet: the chain arrival on a carcass

The griffon specialises in soft parts: muscle, viscera, red meat. Its beak is not powerful enough to open the intact skin of a large ungulate; it waits for a cinereous vulture or an eagle to have made the opening, or for a vehicle or predator to have started the carcass.

Once the door is open, the scene is fast. Griffons arrive in numbers, spotted visually as the first one drops. Twenty to forty birds can land in under an hour on a sheep carcass and reduce it to a frame in a few hours. The full sequence, with the bearded vulture at the end of service for the bones and the Egyptian vulture for the scraps, can run one to three days.

Reintroducing the griffon vulture in France: 1981, Causse Méjean

On 15 December 1981, five griffon pairs were released on the Causse Méjean in the Cévennes by the LPO and the Cévennes National Park. Jean-Marie Lamblard tells the story in Le Vautour (2001): agreement with livestock farmers, support from local councils, long preparation. France no longer had wild griffons outside the western Pyrenees, where the Ossau reserve (1974) had protected the last core.

The operation worked. The birds bred from 1982, spread to the Grands Causses in the 1990s, climbed back up the Baronnies in the early 2000s, and arrived regularly in the Vercors in the 2010s. The success owes to extensive livestock farming (sheep and cattle on summer pasture), the near absence of veterinary diclofenac in France, and LPO/State coordination.

The griffon vulture and its information networks

The English naturalist Henry Tristram described as early as 1859 what are now called the aerial information networks of vultures. The idea is simple: each bird in flight watches not only the ground but, above all, its neighbours. When one of them spirals down, the others infer that it has spotted something, change course and descend in turn. Information propagates from bird to bird over dozens of kilometres, which is why an isolated carcass can attract twenty to forty birds in under an hour. For us, ground observers, it is also a tool: a griffon dropping fast, wings almost folded, signals a resource somewhere. We follow the direction, we wait for the second one, and often we get the confirmation.

That trait explains the whole strategy of the species. A golden eagle prospects alone; a griffon prospects connected to the entire visual group. That is what makes the species efficient at finding very scattered carcasses across the landscape.

Frequently asked questions

Can the griffon vulture lift a lamb?

No. Its feet are weak, incapable of carrying prey. It never takes off with its food, unlike an eagle which can carry a young boar or a hare.

Does it call?

Almost never. Low grunts and hisses around carcasses, whistles near the nest. You will never hear a griffon from a ridge.

How long does it live?

About 25 years in the wild, over 40 in captivity in wildlife parks. Sexual maturity at 5 years, a single chick per year.

Does it attack livestock?

The documented cases involve dying animals or placentas. No attacks on healthy livestock in the veterinary records published by département services.

Going further

• Comparison of the four Vercors vultures: pillar page.
• The largest of the four: cinereous vulture.
• The bone specialist: bearded vulture.
• The rarest in the Vercors: Egyptian vulture.
• Difference from the golden eagle: eagle or vulture.
• Watching spots: watching vultures in the Vercors.
• Symbolism and history: the vulture in history.