King vulture
King vulture | |
---|---|
Juvenile and adult in Costa Rica | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Order: | Cathartiformes |
Family: | Cathartidae |
Genus: | Sarcoramphus |
Species: | S. papa
|
Binomial name | |
Sarcoramphus papa | |
The distribution of the king vulture | |
Synonyms | |
Vultur papa Linnaeus, 1758 |
The king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa) is a large
Large and predominantly white, the king vulture has gray to black ruff, flight, and tail feathers. The head and neck are bald, with the skin color varying, including yellow, orange, blue, purple, and red. The king vulture has a very noticeable orange fleshy caruncle on its beak. This vulture is a scavenger and it often makes the initial cut into a fresh carcass. It also displaces smaller New World vulture species from a carcass. King vultures have been known to live for up to 30 years in captivity.
King vultures were popular figures in the
Etymology, taxonomy, and systematics
The king vulture was originally described by
There are two theories on how the king vulture earned the "king" part of its common name. The first is that the name is a reference to its habit of displacing smaller vultures from a carcass and eating its fill while they wait.[9] An alternative theory reports that the name is derived from Mayan legends, in which the bird was a king who served as a messenger between humans and the gods.[10] This bird was also known as the "white crow" by the Spanish in Paraguay.[11] It was called cozcacuauhtli in Nahuatl, derived from cozcatl "collar" and cuauhtli "bird of prey".[12]
The exact
Fossil record and evolution
The genus Sarcoramphus, which today contains only the king vulture, had a wider distribution in the past. The Kern vulture (Sarcoramphus kernense), lived in southwestern
Little can be said of the
Bartram's "painted vulture"
A "painted vulture" ("Sarcoramphus sacra" or "S. papa sacra") is described in William Bartram's notes of his travels in Florida during the 1770s. This bird's description matches the appearance of the king vulture except that it had a white, not black, tail.[23] Bartram describes the bird as being relatively common and even claimed to have collected one.[23] However, no other naturalists recorded the painted vulture in Florida and sixty years after the sighting, its validity began to be questioned, leading to what John Cassin described as the most inviting problem in North American ornithology.[23] An independent account and painting was made of a similar bird by Eleazar Albin in 1734.[24]
While most early ornithologists defended Bartram's honesty, Joel Asaph Allen argued that the painted vulture was mythical and that Bartram mixed elements of different species to create this bird.[23] Allen pointed out that the birds' behavior, as recorded by Bartram, is in complete agreement with the caracara's.[23] For example, Bartram observed the birds following wildfires to scavenge for burned insects and box turtles. Such behavior is typical of caracaras, but the larger and shorter-legged king vultures are not well adapted for walking. The crested caracara (Caracara cheriway) was believed to be common and conspicuous in Bartram's days, but it is notably absent from Bartram's notes if the painted vulture is accepted as a Sarcoramphus.[23] However, Francis Harper argued that the bird could, as in the 1930s, have been rare in the area Bartram visited and could have been missed.[23]
Harper noticed that Bartram's notes were considerably altered and expanded in the printed edition, and the detail of the white tail appeared in print for the first time in this revised account. Harper believed that Bartram could have tried to fill in details of the bird from memory and got the tail coloration wrong.
Description
Excluding the two species of
The king vulture has, relative to its size, the largest skull and braincase, and strongest bill, of the New World vultures.[19] This bill has a hooked tip and a sharp cutting edge.[7] The bird has broad wings and a short, broad, and square tail.[28] The irises of its eyes are white and bordered by bright red sclera.[3] Unlike some New World vultures, the king vulture lacks eyelashes.[31] It also has gray legs and long, thick claws.[28]
The vulture is minimally sexually dimorphic, with no difference in plumage and little in size between males and females.[3] The juvenile vulture has a dark bill and eyes, and a downy, gray neck that soon begins to turn the orange of an adult. Younger vultures are a slate gray overall, and, while they look similar to the adult by the third year, they do not completely molt into adult plumage until they are around five or six years of age.[28] Jack Eitniear of the Center for the Study of Tropical Birds in San Antonio, Texas reviewed the plumage of birds in captivity of various ages and found that ventral feathers were the first to begin turning white from two years of age onwards, followed by wing feathers, until the full adult plumage was achieved. The final immature stages being a scattered black feathers in the otherwise white lesser wing coverts.[32]
The vulture's head and neck are featherless as an adaptation for hygiene, though there are black bristles on parts of the head; this lack of feathers prevents bacteria from the carrion it eats from ruining its feathers and exposes the skin to the sterilizing effects of the sun.[7][33]
Dark-plumaged immature birds may be confused with turkey vultures, but soar with flat wings, while the pale-plumaged adults could feasibly be confused with the wood stork,[34] although the latter's long neck and legs allow for easy recognition from afar.[35]
Distribution and habitat
The king vulture inhabits an estimated 14 million square kilometres (5,400,000 sq mi) between southern
Ecology and behavior
The king vulture soars for hours effortlessly, only flapping its wings infrequently.[35][42] While in flight, its wings are held flat with slightly raised tips, and from a distance the vulture can appear to be headless while in flight.[43] Its wing beats are deep and strong.[28] Birds have been observed engaging in tandem flight on two occasions in Venezuela by naturalist Marsha Schlee, who has proposed it could be a part of courtship behaviour.[44]
Despite its size and gaudy coloration, this vulture is quite inconspicuous when it is perched in trees.
Breeding
The reproductive behaviour of the king vulture in the wild is poorly known, and much knowledge has been gained from observing birds in captivity,
Feeding
The king vulture eats anything from cattle carcasses down to corpses of monkeys and other arboreal mammals to beached fish and dead lizards.[52] In densely forested areas, mammals likely
to be included are many of the abundant sloths (
Conservation
This bird is a species of
Relationship with humans
The king vulture is one of the most common species of birds represented in the Maya codices.[57] Its glyph is easily distinguishable by the knob on the bird's beak and by the concentric circles that make up the bird's eyes.[57] Sometimes the bird is portrayed as a god with a human body and a bird head.[57] According to Maya mythology, this god often carried messages between humans and the other gods.[48] It may also be used to represent Cozcacuauhtli, the thirteenth day of the month in the Aztec calendar (13 Reed). An ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata) was also considered to be the bird depicted, but the hooked bill and wattle point to the raptor.[12]
The bird's blood and feathers were also used to cure diseases.[33] The king vulture is also a popular subject on the stamps of the countries within its range. It appeared on a stamp for El Salvador in 1963, Belize in 1978, Guatemala in 1979, Honduras in 1997, Bolivia in 1998, and Nicaragua in 1999.[58]
Because of its large size and beauty, the king vulture is an attraction at zoos around the world. The king vulture is one of several bird species with an AZA studbook, which is kept by Shelly Collinsworth of the Fort Worth Zoo.[59]
References
- ^ . Retrieved 11 November 2021.
- Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis. Tomus I. Editio decima, reformata(in Latin). Holmiae. (Laurentii Salvii). p. 86.
V. naribus carunculatis, vertice colloque denudate
- ^ ISBN 84-87334-15-6.
- ^ Duméril, A. M. Constant (1805). Zoologie analytique : ou, Méthode naturelle de classification des animaux; endue plus facile a l'aide de tableaux synoptiques (in French). Paris: Allais. p. 32. The book bears the date of 1806 on the title page but was actually published in 1805. See: Gregory, Steven M.S. (2010). "The two 'editions' of Duméril's Zoologie analytique, and the potential confusion caused by Froriep's translation Analytische Zoologie" (PDF). Zoological Bibliography. 1 (1): 6–8.
- ISBN 0-19-910207-4.
- ^ Peterson, Alan P. (23 December 2007). "Richmond Index – Genera Aaptus – Zygodactylus". The Richmond Index. Division of Birds at the National Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 17 January 2008.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8160-5904-1.
- ^ JSTOR 1367720. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
- ^ Wood, John George (1862). The illustrated natural history. London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge. pp. 15–17.
- ^ a b c "King Vulture". National Geographic. Archived from the original on July 3, 2007. Retrieved 11 September 2007.
- ^ ISBN 0-19-913383-2.
- ^ ISBN 0-88402-175-0.
- ^ a b Remsen, J. V. Jr.; C. D. Cadena; A. Jaramillo; M. Nores; J. F. Pacheco; M. B. Robbins; T. S. Schulenberg; F. G. Stiles; D. F. Stotz & K. J. Zimmer. 2007. A classification of the bird species of South America. Archived 2009-03-02 at the Wayback Machine South American Classification Committee. Retrieved on 15 October 2007
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- ^ Suárez, William (2001). "A Re-evaluation of Some Fossils Identified as Vultures (Aves: Vulturidae) from Quaternary Cave Deposits of Cuba" (PDF). Caribbean Journal of Science. 37 (1–2): 110–111. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-10-01.
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- ^ JSTOR 4078256. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2010-11-15.
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- ^ a b Gurney, John Henry (1864). A descriptive catalogue of the raptorial birds in the Norfolk and Norwich museum. Oxford University. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
- JSTOR 1364380. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
- ^ Eitniear, Jack Clinton (1996). "Estimating age classes in king vultures (Sarcoramphus papa) using plumage coloration" (PDF). Journal of Raptor Research. 30 (1): 35–38. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
- ^ a b c "Sarcoramphus papa". Who Zoo. Archived from the original on 1 September 2014. Retrieved 11 September 2007.
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- ^ ISBN 978-0-292-71965-1.
- ^ a b "Species factsheet: Sarcoramphus papa". BirdLife International. 2010. Retrieved 11 September 2007.
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- doi:10.1016/j.jsames.2005.05.004. Archived from the original(PDF) on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 10 November 2010.
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- ^ Schlee, Marsha (2001). "First record of tandem flying in the King Vulture (Sarcoramphus papa)" (PDF). Journal of Raptor Research. 35 (3): 263–64. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
- ^ a b Bellinger, Jack (March 25, 1997). "King Vulture AZA Studbook". Archived from the original on November 10, 2006. Retrieved 8 October 2007.
- ^ Baker, Aaron J.; Whitacre, David F.; Aguirre, Oscar (1996). "Observations of king vultures (Sarcoramphus papa) drinking and bathing". Journal of Raptor Research. 30 (4): 246–47.
- ^ "King Vulture | Cameron Park Zoo". Archived from the original on 2022-08-02. Retrieved 2022-08-02.
- ^ a b c d Ormiston, D. "Sarcoramphus papa". Animal Diversity Web. Retrieved 11 September 2007.
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- ^ a b Ferguson-Lees, J. & Christie, D.A. & Franklin, K. & Mead, D. & Burton, P.. (2001). Raptors of the world. Helm Identification Guides.
- ^ Beason, Robert C. (2003). "Through a Birds Eye: Exploring Avian Sensory Perception" (PDF). Bird Strike Committee USA/Canada, 5th Joint Annual Meeting, Toronto, ONT. University of Nebraska. Retrieved 11 September 2007.
- ^ Lemon, William C (December 1991). "Foraging behavior of a guild of Neotropical vultures" (PDF). Wilson Bulletin. 103 (4): 698–702. Retrieved 13 March 2009.
- ^ "Ecology of Condors". Archived from the original on 1 October 2006. Retrieved 5 October 2006.
- ^ Schlee, Marsha (2005). "King vultures (Sarcoramphus papa) forage in moriche and cucurit palm stands" (PDF). Journal of Raptor Research. 39 (4): 458–61. Retrieved 10 November 2010.
- ^ a b c Tozzer, Alfred Marston; Glover Morrill Allen (1910). Animal Figures in the Maya Codices. Harvard University.
- ^ "King Vulture". Bird Stamps. Archived from the original on November 17, 2000. Retrieved 17 October 2007.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) - ^ "Vulture, King Studbook". AZA website. Silver Spring, MD: Association of Zoos and Aquariums. 2010. Archived from the original on 4 September 2011. Retrieved 15 November 2010. (subscription required)
External links
- King vulture videos on the Internet Bird Collection
- King vulture photo gallery (6 photos) Photo-High Res
- Stamps[usurped] (for Belize, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua) with RangeMap