Two days ago, Fulvio Genero, a VCF advisory board member and long-term griffon vulture researcher, has counted a minimum of 360 griffon vultures feeding at the supplementary feeding site situated at the Riserva Naturale Regionale del Lago di Cornino, in the Italian province Udine, in the northeast of the country (see photo).
This is a new record for the site and probably the biggest concentration of griffons ever recorded in Italy in recent times. Among the vultures feeding, Fulvio could see numerous young from the local breeding colony as well as from nearby Croatian colonies.
The group probably also included griffons summering in the Austrian Alps that moved south after the first snow in the mountains, and adults from the Croatia breeding colonies wandering away from the breedign areas, which are roiughly 160 km away.
A supplementary feeding point for vultures has been built in the Riserva Naturale Regionale del Lago di Cornino, which helped to establish a breeding colony in the area. This year the team there captured and tagged 5 griffon vultures – see the maps of their movements on our monitoring pages>>
Photo: Riserva Naturale Regionale del Lago di Cornino
