Andean Condor

## Old birds from the New World

The largest raptor in the world and the largest flying bird in South America, the Andean condor flies majestically over the mountains and valleys of the Andes in South America. This bird of prey and its close cousin, the California condor, are part of the New World vultures, a family more closely related to storks than to the vultures of Africa.

## In the eye of the beholder

Andean condors are the only New World vultures to show sexual dimorphism. Males are usually larger and have a distinctive comb on top of their head as well as a large neck wattle and yellow eyes. The females lack the comb and have red eyes. The males keep the comb all their life, which makes it easy to tell the sex of an Andean condor chick as soon as it hatches. As adults, both sexes have black plumage with white secondary feathers and white neck ruffles. Juveniles have brown plumage and skin and don’t develop adult coloring until they are about six years old.

## The sky's the limit

To find their food, Andean condors use their excellent eyesight and can spot a meal from high up in the air. They also look for clues to their next meal, such as other raptors gathering in one area on the ground or circling in the sky. Condors can glide over large areas while using very little energy. These huge birds are too heavy to fly without help, so they use warm air currents (thermals) to help them gain altitude and soar through the sky. By gliding from thermal to thermal, a condor may need to flap its wings only about once every hour.

When a condor stretches out its wings, the wing feathers look like outstretched fingertips. These “fingertips” let the condor make fine adjustments in flight, like wing flaps on an airplane.

## A meal to die for

Like all vultures, Andean condors are scavengers and find most of their food after it is already dead. This lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but it does have certain advantages (the food can’t fight back!), and condors have many adaptations that help them. Like most other vultures, condors have featherless heads, to keep from getting too messy while buried in a carcass, and a high resistance to harmful bacteria. Their curved beak is good for tearing rotting flesh.

But as strong and impressive as an Andean condor’s beak looks, it is not as strong as the beaks of other birds of prey. Andean condors have also been known to eat shorebirds and their eggs. After a condor eats, it rubs its head and neck back and forth across the ground to get all the “crumbs” off.

## Hissing and clicking

Andean condors do not have a syrinx (similar to our larynx), so they cannot vocalize. Instead, they hiss, click, and grunt to communicate.

## Condor customs

The male Andean condor uses quite a display to attract his mate. He spreads his wings, clicks his tongue, and hisses, and his neck turns yellow. If the female is impressed, the two find an appropriate nest, usually in a shallow cave on a cliff ledge. The female lays a single egg, which both parents take turns incubating.

Once the chick hatches, both parents are responsible for its care for over a year, well after the chick has fledged at six months. The young condor spends this time learning how to be a condor from its parents, everything from how to catch a thermal to what to eat and how to find it.