In the early 20th century, the bearded vulture vanished from the Alps entirely.
Hunted, poisoned, and persecuted for centuries by farmers who falsely believed it preyed on livestock, the bird — with its 9-foot wingspan, bone-orange chest, and the striking red eye-ring of a medieval grotesque — was gone from French, Swiss, Austrian, and Italian mountain skies by the 1930s. Locals called it the *lammergeier*, the lamb-vulture. They were wrong about what it ate, and the species paid the price.
That story is now being rewritten.
**One of Europe's Greatest Comebacks**
In February 2026, France adopted a new **National Action Plan for the Bearded Vulture: 2026–2035**. The plan is the third of its kind, and the most ambitious yet: a vision to achieve a **42% increase in the number of territorial pairs** by 2034 and to dramatically extend the species' range beyond the high Alps into new mountain regions.
The plan builds on a conservation effort that has already achieved something remarkable.
The Alpine reintroduction programme began in the 1970s, coordinated by the International Foundation for the Conservation of Vultures and wildlife agencies across Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland. The first captive-bred birds were released back into the wild in **1986**. Since then, over 260 birds have been released across the Alpine arc — and the population has grown to **self-sustaining** status.
By 2025, the Alpine bearded vulture population recorded **118 nesting pairs** — more than at any point in the modern record. The birds are breeding naturally. Young are fledging. The mountain thermals that once carried the species into oblivion are now lifting a recovered population higher each year.
**What the Bearded Vulture Does**
The bearded vulture (*Gypaetus barbatus*) is one of the most distinctive raptors on Earth. Europe's largest bird of prey by wingspan, it occupies a completely unique ecological role: it feeds almost exclusively on **bones**.
Other scavengers — griffon vultures, ravens, golden eagles — strip a carcass of flesh. The lammergeier arrives last, after everyone else has finished, and takes what no other bird can use. It carries large bones high into the sky and drops them onto rocky outcroppings — called ossuaries — to crack them open and access the nutrient-rich marrow inside. It swallows bone fragments whole, digesting them with gastric acid strong enough to dissolve calcium.
This makes the bearded vulture irreplaceable in its ecosystem. It is the clean-up crew's clean-up crew — the final stage in the Alpine decomposition cycle, returning calcium and nutrients from large herbivore carcasses back into the mountain food web.
With wolves, ibex, and chamois recovering across the Alps, the food supply for vultures is also expanding.
**The LIFE Gyp'Act Project**
Running until November 2028, the **LIFE Gyp'Act project** is the current operational backbone of the French reintroduction effort. Funded by the European Union's LIFE programme, it is coordinating the release of **60 additional captive-bred bearded vultures** into key areas of southeast France and the Pre-Alps.
The birds are released using the **hacking method**: young vultures are placed in artificial cliff nests, fed without human contact, and allowed to acclimatise to their mountain environment before making their first flights. Each bird is fitted with a GPS transmitter, giving researchers real-time tracking data on movements, territory establishment, and survival.
The project also works to mitigate the remaining threats to the population: electrocution from power lines (a leading cause of raptor death across Europe), collision with wind turbines, and — still — occasional deliberate poisoning. Maintaining feeding stations in key zones supplements food availability during harsh winters.
**Connecting the Populations**
One of the major strategic goals of the new National Action Plan is **connectivity** — building a bridge, via the Massif Central and the Pre-Alps, between the recovering Alpine population and the entirely separate bearded vulture population in the Pyrenees.
Connected populations are genetically healthier and more resilient. A single disease outbreak or extreme weather event is less likely to devastate a population that spans multiple mountain ranges than one confined to a single area. The plan envisions a bearded vulture population distributed across France's mountain arcs — Alps, Pyrenees, Massif Central, Cévennes — by 2035.
**Why This Matters**
The bearded vulture's return is not a minor footnote in European conservation. It is a proof of concept.
A species that was hunted out of existence across an entire continent — a bird with one of the slowest reproductive rates of any European raptor, producing only one egg per year, with pairs taking six to seven years to reach breeding age — has been brought back to self-sustaining population status through sustained, cross-border, multi-decade effort.
It is also a reminder of what the Alps looked like before humans decided that large predators and scavengers were the enemy. The skies above Mont Blanc and the Ecrins and the Mercantour are not poorer for having a 9-foot wingspan casting a shadow on the snow below.
They are richer. As they were always meant to be. 🦅🏔️
*Sources: 4vultures.org · LIFE Gyp'Act Project · Rewilding Europe (Feb–March 2026) · French Ministry of Ecological Transition · Bearded Vulture International Studbook*
