Raptors – birds of prey – are among the most remarkable, charismatic and startling of birds. We’re talking about a group of hook-billed predators where there are species that predate on everything from insects and fish to large terrestrial mammals and fast-flying birds, that have taken to life in high mountains, dense tropical forests, the fringes of the oceans and everywhere in between, and are sometimes equipped with remarkable power, most notably in the bill and their massively taloned feet.
Here, I’m referring specifically to accipitriforms: the New World vultures, secretarybirds, ospreys, Old World vultures, kites, harriers, hawks and eagles. Falcons are not part of this group – instead being close kin of parrots and passerines – hence abandonment of the term Falconiformes for the entire lot.
And, yes, I aim to use the word raptors as much as possible in this article because I want to remind you that the word raptor is already in use for the group of birds called raptors. I find it irksome and really inconvenient that some people now associate the term with dromaeosaurids. Anyway… here’s a quick run-down of raptor diversity, history and phylogeny. I have them on my mind as I’ve been working on the extensive raptor section of the giant textbook I’m compiling (on which go here). Several especially good books tackle raptors, some of my favourites including the 1990 Merehurst Birds of Prey (Newton 1990), and Leslie Brown’s Birds of Prey (Brown 1976a) and Eagles of the World(Brown 1976b). Needless to say, Volume 2 of the Handbook of the Birds of the World is also really useful for specialists.
Compelling proof that New World vultures really are close kin of other accipitriforms: they adopt identical pooping postures. At left, juvenile Andean condor Vultur gryphus. At right, White-tailed sea eagle Haliaeetus albicilla. Credit: Darren Naish
Condors and other New World vultures. We start with New World vultures, a group unique to the Americas today, but with a fossil record that involves Europe. This group is most frequently termed Cathartidae but the name Vulturidae is also used here and there, and right now it isn’t totally clear (at least, not to me) which is ‘correct’; both are in current use. There are only seven living species: the two condors, a few mid-sized species, and the King vulture Sarcoramphus papa, a species that shares features with condors and seems closer to them than it is to the smaller species. It may actually be a condor if some recent molecular results prove correct (Johnson et al. 2016).
As I’ve said at Tet Zoo on many previous occasions, the idea that New World vultures are close kin of storks is – even today – often mentioned as if it’s a cutting-edge and avant-garde idea which demonstrates the up-to-dateness of the person mentioning it. It’s true that several studies of the 1960s and early 90s did support such an affinity (a result being that various books and articles of the late 20th century classify New World vultures as part of Ciconiiformes*), but it’s absolutely not supported today. New World vultures really are close relatives of hawks, eagles and kin while storks are part of the waterbird assemblage and in a completely different part of the tree (e.g., Hackett et al. 2008, Prum et al. 2015).
* Though this issue is made more complex by the fact that Sibley & Ahlquist (1990) recognised a gigantic, super-inclusive version of Ciconiiformes that included numerous neoavian groups never previously included within that group.
New World vultures are famed for their excellent sense of smell, their specialisation for carrion-feeding, the flamboyant display features of species like the King vulture and Andean condor Vultur gryphus, and for the giant size of the condors (a very large Andean condor can reach 3.2 m in wingspan and weigh 15 kg). They have a rich fossil record that reveals an interesting former diversity and more complex guild structure than that present today.
The Painted vulture. A curiosity concerns the alleged existence of a white-tailed relative of the King vulture: the Painted vulture S. sacra, supposedly observed by William Bartram in Florida in 1791. Views on this bird have wavered from full-fledged acceptance of the existence of a distinctive Sarcoramphusvulture in the southern USA to the more popular idea that it was mythical, based on an inaccurate or confused reporting of anatomical features, or a garbled composite of raptors of more than one species (Harper 1936). Most recently, Snyder & Fry (2013a, b) argued that the bird – described and illustrated independently by Eleazar Albin in 1734 following observation of a ‘Warwovwen or Indian vulture’ imported to England from the New World – likely was a valid entity… not the result I was expecting!
