At a crossroads in the sky

The Egyptian vulture is hard to miss. Its bare-skinned face is the yellow of chicken feet.

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It wears a spiky mane, and poufy feathers halfway down its legs. A beak shaped like a talon helps its scrape the meat off dead animals.

It is small, particularly for a raptor, growing to about 2 ft in height, with a wingspan of about 5 ft. But it's a bird that uses those wings dramatically.

The Egyptian vulture's migratory route arcs across 40 countries on three continents: Europe, where it breeds, and Africa and Asia, where it winters and rears its young.

That arc is ending prematurely and abruptly, for a number of individuals, as they crash into new power lines and wind farms thrown up across their migratory routes.