Endangered
Lappet-faced Vulture
Torgos tracheliotos
The lappet-faced vulture or Nubian vulture is an Old World vulture belonging to the bird order Accipitriformes, that also includes eagles, kites, buzzards and hawks.
Appearance
The bill, at up to 10 cm (3.9 in) long and 5 cm (2.0 in) deep, ranks as one of the largest of any accipitrid, although a reported culmen length of 7.2 cm (2.8 in) is slightly less than the culmen length of the cinereous vulture. Overall, the lappet-faced vulture is blackish above with a strongly contrasting white thigh feathers. The black feathers on the back of African vultures are lined with brown, while Arabian birds are dark brown rather than black above.
This species measures around 95–115 cm (37–45 in) in body length, with a wingspan of 2.5–2.9 m (8.2–9.5 ft).
Range and habitat
This species is patchily distributed through much of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, though it is absent from much of the central and western parts of the continent and declining elsewhere in its range. This vulture prefers to live in dry savannah, thornbush, arid plains, deserts with scattered trees in wadis, open mountain slopes. While foraging, they can wander into denser habitats and even into human inhabited areas, especially if drawn to road kills.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Even so, lappet-faced vultures frequently hang around the edges of the throngs at large carcasses, waiting until the other vultures are done, to feed on remnant skin, tendons, and other coarse tissues that the others will not eat.
In crisis
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Lappet-faced Vulture is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Lappet-faced Vulture, Wikidata item Q838162. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
