The God of Andes - Lord of the South American sky

Ancient vultures, also known as the Andean Gods. This animal has a massive body, the largest flying bird in the world. It has been recorded that the Andes Spirit individuals have a body length of up to 2m, weighs 20kg, wings 4.5m.

They have the scientific name Vultur gryphus , belonging to the New World vultures. This species is distributed in South America in the Andes, including the Santa Marta Mountains. In the north, its range begins in Venezuela and Colombia, continues south along the Andes in Ecuador, Peru, and Chile, through Bolivia and western Argentina Tierra del Fuego.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the god of the Andes spawned from western Venezuela to Tierra del Fuego, along the entire chain of the Andes, but its scope was greatly reduced by human activity. Its habitat mainly consists of open grasslands and high mountains up to 5,000m.

It likes areas without forests, allowing it to detect animal corpses from the air. The range of lowland distribution in eastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil, down to desert areas in Chile and Peru, is found throughout southern Patagonia.

Although they are vultures, they have no kinship close to the Old World vultures, although they have many similarities, they eat corpses. They are very good olfactory species, unlike the Old World vultures, only have good eyesight.

They locate the scavenger by detecting the smell of ethyl mercaptan, a gas released by decaying corpses. Andes is the largest flying bird in the world, with an adult body length of 1.3m, weighing 13kg, wingspan of up to 3m.

They have long and wide wings, hard tails, suitable for hovering over thousands of meters, where the air is very thin, low pressure. They have weak claws, which are not suitable for tipping prey flying into the air. The strange thing is that the God of Andes has no sound organ of birds, so their sound is only limited to the rare sounds of sings and whispers.

Their beaks are slightly curved and relatively weak compared to other predatory birds. It is only adapted to tearing down the weak flesh of decomposed corpses, not fresh meat. The Andean spirit has abnormal behavior that excretes urine in the scaly part of the legs to cool them by evaporation. This behavior is also present in storks, and this is an argument for the close relationship between these two groups of birds