Europe’s largest and heaviest raptor, the cinereous vulture, once lived across the entire breadth of Europe, but numbers have declined over the last 200 years largely due to inadvertent poisoning, leaving fragmented populations clinging on.
But later this year the birds, also known as the black vulture, will return to the skies above the Rhodope mountain range, which stretches through southeastern Europe along the southern border of Bulgaria and into northeastern Greece.
