This work comes from Gray and White: A Love Letter to 50 of North America’s Most Unknown Animals Author: Jason Bittle. Copyright belongs to the author © 2026 Reprinted with permission from National Geographic.
The vulture is a beast through and through.
With a razor-sharp beak and a wingspan of over 6 feet, there aren’t many flying creatures on this continent that can surpass it. Heck, bald eagles are probably even more impressive when they’re sitting on the ground, reaching a height of nearly 3 feet or more, or about as tall as a human toddler. If you’ve ever witnessed one of these white-headed, brown-bodied predators pierce a still-gasping salmon with thumb-sized talons and tear the fish into bloody ribbons, you’ll understand why this descendant of dinosaurs is a raptor to be reckoned with.
By the way, those claws? When they close, they actually lock into place, thanks to a series of tendon notches that allow them to grip increasingly tighter. All told, vultures can hold on to their prey with about 10 times more force than a human hand. Now, while the physical specimen of the condor is impressive, it has one characteristic that doesn’t match what you see on television – the patented condor scream. In fact, any birder will tell you that the sky-tearing screams that accompany most media depictions of bald eagles actually belong to red-tailed hawks. So, what does a buzzard sound like?
“I’ve always thought condors sounded like they were cackling,” said Janet Ng, a wildlife biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service. “A whistling giggle.”
It wasn’t the only thing we got wrong, either. Although vultures are capable predators in their own right—they have telescopic vision and can see ultraviolet light—they are not averse to having other animals work for them. In fact, Ben Franklin, an American Enlightenment scientist and one of America’s founding fathers, famously opposed the adoption of the bald eagle as a national symbol for this very reason. “The bald eagle… is a bird of bad character. He lives dishonestly… [he] Franklin wrote, “He was too lazy to fish for himself.” This was certainly true.
“Vultures are what we call kleptoparasites,” Wu said. “They often steal food from other birds.” However, despite what Franklin thought, there was nothing shameful about being a thief (at least as an animal; nation-states are another matter).
In the wild, animals will do anything to survive. Hyena steals from lion. Lion steals from hyena. Bears steal from squirrels. Bears steal from bees. Bees steal from each other. constantly. You might even say that rogue parasitism makes the world go round.
Hey, did you know that the word “raptor” – commonly used to describe birds of prey – comes from the Latin verb Rapiowhich means plunder, robbery, plunder or kidnapping? So, yes, vultures are like pirates, swooping in and taking what they want, when they want it. But let’s not pretend that doing so carries any moral weight.
When vultures aren’t stealing, they also scavenge for food from animals killed on the roads, or from human garbage or town landfills. Again, none of this makes any real sense. Even if you know all this and still love vultures, put them on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and everything else.
Incidentally, Wu confirms that the fascination with bald eagles is largely corporate America. People in Canada and Mexico view the condor as just another bird, no matter how impressive it is. But no matter where you’re from, there’s another legend about the bald eagle that people are starting to forget – a bird we nearly drove to extinction just a few decades ago.
Before Europeans colonized North America, bald eagles were found almost everywhere as long as there was a river, lake or stream large enough to support large numbers of fish. In fact, a written record from New England in 1668 stated that the number of bald eagles was so numerous that it was “endless.” Therefore, colonists sometimes fed them to their pigs.
The common name for vulture comes from around the same time and does not mean hairless. Instead, “bald” comes from the Old English word “piebald,” still used today to refer to horses, meaning alternating dark and light colors. For example, the dark brown body feathers of a bald eagle contrast sharply with the pure white head feathers. Oh, and these white feathers usually don’t fully grow until the bird is five years old, so young eagles are not bald in any sense.
Estimates vary and usually include only the United States, but during colonial times at least 50,000 breeding pairs and possibly as many as 500,000 vultures circled the continent’s skies. Of course, this is where things take a turn, as a lot of people don’t like birds that much.
“The Eagles sometimes get a bad rap, and we see that in a lot of places around the world,” Wu said. “Buzzards feed on carrion, so if someone goes out and sees a dead cow or a dead lamb and there’s a buzzard on it, they immediately assume that the bird killed it.”
Likewise, in 1917, the state of Alaska even instituted a bounty system that paid people to go out and kill as many bald eagles as they could, arguing that salmon fishing was too competitive. An eagle sold for $2 from the state, which at today’s prices is nearly $50. Meanwhile, there are rumors that vultures sometimes kidnap human babies and fly away with them in their talons. Add to that the feathered hat fashion trend that swept America after the Civil War, and frankly, there were too many incentives to hunt bald eagles. More than 120,000 eagles have been slaughtered in Alaska’s bounty system alone.
All of this would do enough damage to mainland vulture populations. But then we started killing vultures more efficiently, and completely by accident. When the United States entered World War II, wartime manufacturing spurred the United States to switch from the dominant insecticide of the time, a natural compound called pyrethrum, to another: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or what we now know as DDT.
In the years after World War II, DDT replaced pyrethrin as the most popular stand-alone insecticide, and it performed its job well—killing insects and other arthropods by disrupting their nervous systems while seemingly leaving humans unharmed. Of course, today we know that high-dose exposure to DDT can cause a variety of illnesses in humans, including vomiting and epileptic seizures. It is also a possible carcinogen. But at the time, it was thought to be harmless to mammals. “There are some photos and videos showing children playing in DDT, which is released by trucks driving on nearby roads,” Wu said.
And another problem is quietly brewing. “The problem with DDT is that it stays in the environment and gets washed into the water, and then plants and small animals like insects and fish eat the residue,” Wu said. Then other fish eat these animals, and other animals eat these fish, and the pesticides move up the food chain, concentrating until eventually, some of the poisonous fish are eaten by vultures (scientists call this process bioaccumulation).
Oddly, DDT did not kill the birds directly, but caused their eggshells to collapse under the weight of the hatching birds. Fortunately, Wu said, scientists studying the birds have noticed that hatching rates are flat, so even if vultures don’t fall out of the sky in large numbers, scientists can detect the problem before it’s too late. In 1972, the use of DDT was banned in most situations in the United States. Canada followed suit in 1985, and Mexico followed suit in 2000.
It’s taken some time, but bald eagle populations have slowly rebounded from a low of just 417 nesting pairs across the United States in 1963 to about 316,700 bald eagles in the lower 48 states. Scientists estimate there are at least 100,000 more nesting pairs in Canada and Alaska.
The comeback has been so good that Wu says many people she meets in Canada now don’t even realize the birds are all but gone. There’s a scientific term for this too. It’s called shifted baseline syndrome, and it refers to how we see what we see in nature—smaller fish, fewer insects, a lack of large predators—as the way it’s always been. But condors and their return show that our baseline can shift in the other direction, too.
So if one day you are lucky enough to see a bald eagle harassing an osprey for fish, or perhaps feeding on a roadside deer carcass, take a moment to reflect. We have almost lost these huge, scary, giggly people forever.
