Today’s Bird Fact! Ruppell’s Griffon Vulture is listed as critically endangered. One of their biggest threats is poisoning. Humans will set up poisoned carcasses to get predators, like lions or hyenas, but instead kill large numbers of vultures. In one instance 600 hundred vultures were killed from a poisoned elephant carcass because the poachers did not want vultures to give away their location to authorities. "Vultures are long-lived birds that reproduce very slowly, producing an average of one chick every other year. Their current mortality rates are well above what is sustainable and populations of all species are crashing across the continent.” They have backward-pointing spikes on the tongue to help remove meat from bone. “They have a specialized variant of the hemoglobin alpha subunit; this protein has a great affinity for oxygen, which allows the species to absorb oxygen efficiently despite the low partial pressure in the upper troposphere.”