|  A colony of around 200 vultures apparently killed a cow and its newborn calf on a farm near Villar de Peralonso (Salamanca) yesterday lunchtime.
It seems that the cow went into labour shortly before noon, but when the farmer returned to check on progress around two and a half hours later, he found around two hundred vultures hungrily devouring the two corpses.
The local mayor said that "It's a very unusual incident because vultures never eat live animals," adding that there had been reports of a similar case recently in the nearby village of El Manzano "though nobody paid very much attention at the time."
Unusually large colonies of vultures have also been reported in the Arribes del Duero area recently.
Being carrion birds, their chances of survival have been severely hampered by the introduction of legislation in 2001 in response to the 'mad-cow' crisis, that obliges farmers to remove animal corpses from their fields immediately. |
