The First Report of Laying of a Vulture Injured and bred in Korea

Abstract

A vulture injured and bred in Paju, Korea laid its eggs for the first time. The vulture Rescue Center in Paju of the Korean Association for Bird Protection has 31 vultures which were injured due to accidents. Most of them started showing signal of breeding. They collected various sizes of branches provided in the rescue center to form nests in March 2010. The pairs touched their heads or rub their bodies which were considered as copulation in the early March 2011. Then, the pairs formed nests with 1m length branches and incubated round-edged stones with the dimension of 6 cm×4 cm×3 cm instead of eggs from March 15, 2012. The sizes are smaller than vulture egg (average size of 9 cm (longer axis)×7 cm (shorter axis)) in their natural size. Actions like copulation had been shown since March 5, 2012. A vulture laid an egg around 10:00 AM in March 19, 2012. This is the first breeding report of a vulture spending winter in Korea. The Red List of IUCN 2008 showed that there were 10,000 pairs of vultures all over the world (IUCN, 2008) and they showed decreasing of population. They mainly live in Asia centered on Mongolia and some live in the southern Europe and some area in the Middle Asia. A vulture (Aegypius monachus) has wings of 250-295 cm and a female has the weight between 8 and 12.5 kg, a little bit larger than a male with 7.5-11.5 kg (Ferguson-Lees and Christie 2001, Brown and Amadon 1968). The number of eagles which spend winter in Korea has increased from 1,200 in 2002 up to 2,500 in 2012. The vultures distribute all over the Korea but tend to focus on vulture restaurants including Paju City (Jin et al., 2012). As well, the number of vultures rescued from accidents has increased.