In a 2013 to 2018 study near Bariloche, Argentina, eight condors flapped for only 1.3 percent of their recorded flight time. When they did flap, they flapped their wings about 2.7 times a second. More than three quarters of all the flapping the condors did was linked to takeoffs, when a heavy bird must get off the ground. In strong thermals the condors could climb as fast as 8.0 meters per second, a rate averaged over 10 seconds.
Condors in the study spent over twice as much flight time soaring in thermals (32.5 percent) as in air pushed up by hillsides (12.1 percent), and one condor in the study flew for more than 5 hours without flapping, covering about 172 kilometers (107 miles).
Averaged over a day, a tracked condor spent about 182 minutes traveling between where it slept and where it fed, and the most it spent in a day was 11 hours.
Scientists studied what Patagonia’s vultures eat and found that Andean condors and black vultures eat mostly the same food: carcasses of farm animals. Andean condors mostly eat the dead bodies of large animals, such as deer, cows and sheep, and they are mainly scavengers, but they have been seen taking some live prey such as marmots, birds and rabbits.
The Andean condor was declared extinct in Venezuela in the late 1960s, and only 30 to 60 birds were thought to survive in Colombia in the 1980s. The 1989 Colombian reintroduction began with five male Andean condor chicks raised under the same method as California condors, and a plan to return condors to their native Colombian home. As of November 2026, in the first Andean condor count for Colombia, 63 condors were recorded at the same moment across all the watching points.
Andean condors are thought to mate for life. They do not build nests, and the female lays one egg. The parents keep it warm for about two months before the chick hatches. A young condor needs six years or more to become an adult. Nobody knows how long wild condors really live; the best estimate is about 50 years.
Words to know
- thermals: rising warm air
- takeoffs: leaving the ground
- scavengers: eaters of carrion
- carcasses: dead animals
- reintroduction: return to wild
