During this turkey weekend I found a bird called Pharoah’s Chicken, though he isn’t a chicken at all.
This large bird of prey is an Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus) whose nickname refers to his use as a symbol of Egyptian royalty.
He lives in Europe, Asia and Africa but he no longer lives well. Sadly he’s endangered, having declined by 50% in Europe in only 20 years (1980-2001) and drastically in India where there’s a vulture crisis caused by livestock antibiotics that are poisonous to the vultures.
This bird posed nicely for a photograph in a zoo in Spain.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
I heard all about the diclofenac mess in India at a program at the Aviary years ago. The woman who did the program was a falconer from the UK (now in North Carolina) who was involved in the vulture recovery programs in India. Really well done. I even got to surprise her when she was doing a slide show about her birds when I knew what her Harris Hawks were.