Lammergeier Soaring — Pyrenees National Park

The French and Spanish Pyrenees hold the largest bearded vulture — lammergeier — population in Western Europe outside the Alps, and the Pyrenees National Park and the adjacent Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park offer the most reliable and visually dramatic lammergeier encounters on the continent, with the birds' extraordinary diamond-shaped silhouette and russet-orange underparts identifiable at great distance as they patrol the cliff faces and valley systems in search of bone fragments to drop and crack on traditional ossuary rocks. The lammergeier's feeding strategy — dropping large bones from heights of 60 to 80 metres onto specific rocky platforms to access the bone marrow — is one of the most specialised feeding behaviours in the animal kingdom and can be observed from marked observation points above the Gavarnie cirque and the Ordesa canyon where the birds return repeatedly to the same ossuary rocks. The Pyrenees landscape of enormous glacial cirques, 3,000-metre limestone peaks, and ancient beech forest creates a setting of Alpine grandeur in which the lammergeier's slow soaring flight carries an atmosphere of genuine wilderness. Griffon vultures, Egyptian vultures, and short-toed eagles share the same cliff faces, creating one of Europe's most concentrated raptor landscapes in a single mountain range. The Gavarnie cirque — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — provides the most spectacular single viewpoint for lammergeier watching.