Bearded vulture Lepontino II: rescued, recovered, free again

After months of care, the young bearded vulture Lepontino II was released back into the wild in Linthal GL on 18 August 2026.

The case is a textbook example of how closely lead poisoning and the endangerment of birds of prey in the Swiss Alps are linked, even though in this particular case the exact cause of his collapse could not be fully clarified.

From Tierfehd back to the Alps

The wildlife wardens of the canton of Glarus caught the severely weakened and flightless young bird on 1 April in Tierfehd, south of Linthal. The bearded vulture was suffering from serious balance and coordination disorders and was taken to the Zurich animal hospital for a thorough examination. The tests revealed elevated lead levels in the blood, which on their own, however, could not explain the pronounced symptoms. Since even a low lead burden can impair the vitality and reactions of birds of prey, the experts suspect that it may have contributed to a collision, presumably resulting in a traumatic brain injury.

After initial treatment, the bird was transferred to the wild animal care station at the Goldau Nature and Animal Park SZ. There he recovered to such an extent that the Pro Bartgeier foundation and the cantonal wildlife wardens were now able to release him back into the wild in Linthal.

Who is Lepontino II

The name leads back to Ticino: on 31 July 2023, the first wild-hatched bearded vulture fledged there, named after the Lepontine Alps, to which the Ticino mountain world belongs. The same breeding pair succeeded in raising a second chick in 2025 — precisely that Lepontino II, which has now been released in Linthal. In the meantime, a third chick of this pair, Lepontino III, has already fledged, a sign of how successfully the reintroduction in Ticino has developed.

Switzerland has been taking part since 1991 in the international reintroduction project for the bearded vulture, which had been exterminated throughout the Alpine region at the beginning of the 20th century. There are now 98 territories with successfully breeding pairs in the Alpine region, 35 of them in Switzerland. With 26 fledged young, 2025 was a record year, including the first successful brood in the canton of St. Gallen.

Lead remains the greatest ongoing threat to birds of prey

Even if it remains open in the case of Lepontino II whether a collision or the lead burden itself was primarily responsible for the collapse, the case fits into a well-documented pattern. In the Swiss Alps, golden eagles and bearded vultures have already been shown to have died of lead poisoning. Together with the Grisons Office for Hunting and Fishing, the Sempach Bird Observatory was able to demonstrate by isotope analysis that the lead signature in golden eagle bones corresponds exactly to the signature of hunting ammunition and not to natural lead in the soil. Camera traps also made it possible to prove that golden eagles systematically use the lead-contaminated gralloch from high game and ibex hunting as a food source — a mechanism that arises in a comparable way for scavenging bearded vultures.

How serious the situation is was shown by a study published in 2019 by the University of Zurich, the Sempach Bird Observatory and the Grisons Office for Hunting and Fishing: by international comparison, the lead burden of golden eagles and bearded vultures across the entire Swiss Alpine region reaches unusually high levels — higher than in other European countries such as Spain with the Pyrenees, and higher than in North America. For the bearded vulture, with its still small and vulnerable, albeit growing, population in the Alps, the study's authors classify this finding as particularly alarming: the success of decades of reintroduction work is being seriously jeopardised by lead poisoning.

The National Council only recently rejected a nationwide ban on lead-containing ammunition by a narrow 99 votes to 94, even though the Federal Council itself saw a need for action and had recommended that the motion be adopted. To date, lead-containing ammunition is banned only in individual cantons such as Grisons and Valais. Switzerland thus has a cantonal patchwork instead of a uniform regulation.