Scientists at University of
Castilla-La Mancha’s Research Institute for Hunting Resources (IREC) made an
interesting discovery whilst studying camera trap footage, they found Griffon
Vultures feeding at night, the first time this has been documented.
Griffon Vultures are one of
Europe’s four species of vultures and can be found across southern Europe
surrounding the Mediterranean. Once widespread across its southern European
range the species became extinct in parts of the range and populations in the
east part of its Mediterranean range are currently small and fragmented.
Today around 90 percent of the
European population, between 20,000 and 30,000 breeding pairs, are found in
Spain, Portugal and France.
One such population in the
Cantabrian mountain range, in Spain’s Somiedo Natural Park was the focus of a
study into the feeding behaviour of Griffon Vultures by scientists from the
IREC using camera traps and published in a recent edition of the Ecology
journal (Mateo-Tomás, P. and Olea, P. P. (2018), Griffon Vultures scavenging at
night: trophic niche expansion to reduce intraspecific competition?. Ecology)
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