Can This Bone-Eating Bird Be Saved?

Shannon Hoffman’s helicopter veered toward the snowy cliffs of the Drakensberg mountains, the rocky spine that runs along the border of South Africa and Lesotho, as its pilot tried desperately to regain control. Hoffman and her three companions had flown into the mountains to harvest an egg from the nest of a bearded vulture, one of Earth’s strangest birds of prey. She braced for impact as a rotor blade clipped the ground, flipping the chopper upside down atop a massive escarpment. Moments later her party, miraculously unharmed, clambered from the wreckage and surveyed the snowbound landscape. With the last of her dying cellphone’s battery, she texted her mother, who relayed the message to Hoffman’s brother, who then contacted South Africa’s Air Force. A few hours later, Hoffman heard the thump of a rescue helicopter.

Such are the perils of devoting your life to a bird that inhabits remote and rugged mountains. Hoffman, a raptor conservationist and National Geographic Explorer, has spent a decade raising bearded vultures in captivity through the Bred 4 the Wild Bearded Vulture Breeding Programme, part of a desperate effort to prevent the animals from vanishing from their southern African stronghold. Now, after years of trials, some of the vultures she has paired are at last old enough to reproduce, and she expects the program to have collected 32 in total by the end of 2026, enough to someday seed an abundant, healthy crop of offspring for eventual release. “I’m praying that what we’ve done will work,” she says.

In Africa and beyond, vultures serve as nature’s cleanup crew, devouring carrion, sanitizing landscapes, and preventing the spread of diseases. Even among their fellow scavengers, bearded vultures—whose range extends from Spain to Mongolia, and as far south as Africa’s tip, where they’re genetically distinct—are particularly skilled janitors. They’re the only birds on Earth that subsist primarily on bones, which they crack open on rocks and digest with gastric juices as corrosive as battery acid. They’re also some of the vulturine world’s most elegant members, with eagle-like feathered heads and vibrant plumage that gets its red-orange tinge from the birds’ baths in ocher-rich soil and mud. Hoffman calls them “superbirds.”

Like most vultures, these superbirds are today in trouble, especially the southern African population, which numbers fewer than 400. They’re electrocuted by power lines, squeezed out by development, and poisoned with contaminated carcasses—some set by poachers who don’t want circling vultures betraying their kills. And because bearded vultures, which form lifelong mating bonds and live about 20 years in the wild, typically don’t reproduce until they’re at least eight years old and fledge only one chick per year, they’re unlikely to recover quickly—at least not without help.

That’s where Hoffman comes in. She grew up in eastern South Africa, on an elephant reserve founded and managed by her parents, a childhood that impressed upon her humanity’s responsibility to wildlife. In 2000, she moved to the desert near Dubai, where she learned to fly falcons and fell in love with raptors. Back in South Africa, she realized, many birds of prey were at risk yet suffered from a paucity of attention. Upon returning to her home country, she helped launch the African Bird of Prey Sanctuary to rehabilitate injured birds and educate the public about their protection. In 2012, the sanctuary received a bearded vulture named Leseli, or “Bird of Light” in the Sotho language, that authorities had confiscated from a traditional healer who’d kept her in a small cage. Although Leseli couldn’t be released, the nearly mature female would, Hoffman realized, make a suitable surrogate parent to baby vultures. Similar approaches had worked before in Europe, where conservationists have released hundreds of captive-reared bearded vultures since the 1980s, helping populations rebound. Could captive breeding, with Leseli’s assistance, likewise save southern Africa’s threatened vultures?

A grisly evolutionary adaptation made the idea feasible. The first bearded vulture chick to hatch from a two-egg clutch monopolizes the food supply, eventually starving its sibling. This behavior is known as cainism, for the biblical story in which Cain kills his younger brother, Abel. Those surplus siblings, Hoffman knew, were conservation gold: Since they were doomed anyway, she could capture them, raise them, and coax them into making chicks of their own without depleting wild populations.

In 2015, Hoffman officially launched Bred 4 the Wild, the breeding program inspired by Leseli’s arrival at her sanctuary. Most missions begin with a team traversing hellacious mountain roads or flying a helicopter to a point above an active nest. Once there, an expert climber rappels toward the nest, flushes the parents, and seizes an egg, depositing it in a warm container. On occasion, climbers have also collected hatched chicks whose elder siblings haven’t yet starved them to death. One such bird, thriving to this day, goes by Boris.

Nearly as difficult as collecting eggs is raising the chicks that emerge. To prevent them from imprinting on humans, Hoffman’s team spends about a month feeding them with a vulture puppet, created by a master craftsman in Spain. “Our puppet is more valuable than my car,” Hoffman says. The chicks are then transferred to enclosures, artfully designed to mimic cliff holes, to observe each other and an adult bird that serves as a surrogate parent. (Leseli, Hoffman’s original vulture, helped raise more than 20 chicks herself before her death in 2023.) The chicks eat rats and mice, then graduate to bones and carcasses donated by butcher shops and farmers.

After years of care, some of Bred 4 the Wild’s oldest vultures may finally be mature enough for their greatest milestone yet: reproduction. Five pairs of birds that Hoffman coupled up have been moved into dedicated breeding chambers provisioned with nesting material such as sticks and sheep’s wool. So far, none of the would-be lovebirds have produced chicks, but it could happen any day. While the success of other vulture captive-breeding programs, like the one that helped California condors narrowly evade extinction in the United States, suggests that Hoffman’s efforts may well bear fruit, the suspense is agonizing. “I feel massive pressure,” she says.

Fortunately, Hoffman is well accustomed to enduring trials. Over the course of Bred 4 the Wild’s history, she survived breast cancer and had to relocate the project to a new property in the Drakensberg foothills, where her vultures have flourished despite the absence of electricity and specialized veterinary care. Even if her birds reproduce, Hoffman will continue to face another challenge: abating the threats that imperiled bearded vultures in the first place. To that end, she has spent years trying to communicate the value of vultures to residents of South Africa and Lesotho, and has even given local children vulture-branded hats, knitted by elderly volunteers, to sway the next generation of conservationists. “There’s so many beautiful things in this world that we should try and protect,” she says—bone-devouring, mud-bathing, sibling-killing scavengers included.