Profile
In flight
Birds of Prey
Secretarybird
Sagittarius serpentarius
- epic
- 32 km/h
- Endangered
Stomps venomous snakes to death for fun. 4-foot legs and a punk rock head crest. Don't mess.
- Population
- Estimated 6,700–67,000 mature individuals (wide-uncertainty BirdLife International 2020 assessment figure, sourced to a 2016 estimate), suspected to be undergoing rapid ongoing decline (documented regional declines of ~89% in Kenya, ~82% in Botswana)
- Habitat
- Open grasslands, savanna, and lightly wooded/scrub areas with short grass (favors grass under ~0.5 m); avoids dense forest and true desert; occurs from sea level to ~3,000 m
- Fun fact
- The secretarybird is the only largely terrestrial bird of prey, hunting almost entirely on foot and killing prey with rapid, forceful stomping strikes rather than talon grabs from flight.
- Range
- Sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal to Somalia south to the Western Cape of South Africa (absent from the equatorial West/Central African forest belt)
- Diet
- Carnivorous opportunist: mainly insects (grasshoppers, locusts, beetles, spiders, scorpions) and small vertebrates (rodents, snakes, lizards, birds' eggs and nestlings, occasionally amphibians/crabs); kills by stomping with its feet
- Size
- 1.3 m
- Wingspan
- 2 m
- Lifespan
- 15 years
