Egyptian vultures are medium-sized birds with a wingspan of about 170 cm — roughly the arm span of an adult human. The yellow skin on their face is actually bare — no feathers — and it can change colour to signal their mood to other vultures. A brighter yellow often means a healthier, more confident bird.
Their tool use is what makes scientists especially excited. When Egyptian vultures find a large egg that is too hard to open with their beak alone, they pick up a stone, raise their head, and throw the stone at the egg — repeatedly — until the shell cracks. Only a handful of bird species in the world use tools in this way.
Egyptian vultures are scavengers, meaning they mainly eat things that are already dead. This sounds unpleasant, but vultures play an incredibly important role in nature: they clean up the landscape very quickly, preventing the spread of germs and keeping the environment healthy for other animals.
These birds migrate across vast distances — some travel from Europe and the Middle East to spend winter in Africa, passing over Libya on the way. They have been admired for thousands of years; ancient Egyptians saw them as sacred birds and included them in their hieroglyphs.