This weeks Neat Animal of the Week is the bearded vulture. Bearded vultures take many forms for example as the dirty hippy woman from Bend, OR that scavenges through the trash and refuses to shave any body hair in protest of Nair's testing on baby endangered black rhinoceros fetuses. Or in the form of a very clever yet disgusting name a man gives to his au naturel meat popsicle. Regardless of those other manifestations of the bearded vulture, this week we're talking about the bird of prey, the Lammergeier, the neat bearded vulture. The BV's diet is nearly 90% bone. They are one of the only animals that will even eat bone, let alone survive on a strictly boner diet. They can digest the bone by having an incredibly caustic gastric acid in their stomach. Human gastric acid is between 1 and 1.5 on the pH scale. Bearded vultures maintain a gastric acid pH of nearly 0.7, about 6 times as strong as human acid (pH scale is log based). How neat is that super strong stomach acid?
When possible the bearded vulture will try and deep-throat the whole bone, and when it can't it usually calls their friend Candice who had a lot of experience with this type of thing in college at ASU for advice. But seriously the pieces it can't swallow it takes into the air propelled by thermal updrafts and drops onto rocks, shattering them into pieces it can manage to swallow. Though only between 15-20lbs maximum, these neat animals can pick up an 8lb water buffalo femur and carry it into the air.
Their interesting feather colors are actually manicured. They apply it by rubbing themselves against cliffs and rolling in the mud with high iron oxide content in the soil that stains the feathers. The coloring is a status symbol. Birds with the most intense and deeply stained feathers demonstrate to mates and competition that they are fit and fed enough to get their hair did all the time (see: Salt N Pepa song "Boom I Got Your Boyfriend")
