[4][5] It is a scruffy-looking, small vulture with dark brown plumage, a long thin bill, bare crown, face and fore-neck, and a downy nape and hind-neck.

[9] Usually silent, but gives a shrill, sibilant whistle during copulation, and thin squealing calls both at nests and carcasses.

[9] It breeds in a stick nest in trees (often palms) in much of Africa south of the Sahara, laying one egg.

[citation needed] In Ghanaian universities, a significantly higher number of hooded vultures exist in the residential parts of the campus relative to the non-residential parts, and densities are correlated with the academic calendar, with numbers of individuals increasing during school terms.

[4] They are most active during the day, and their ranges are smaller in the dry breeding season, when their movement is constrained by a nest site location to which they must return regularly to incubate their eggs and provision their fledglings.

[4] In both the northern and southern hemisphere populations, breeding takes place in the dry summer season.

[6] They tend to occur in higher densities where populations of larger Gyps vultures are low or nonexistent.

[17] Some declines have been reported to have occurred in only 20 years, almost approaching the speed and extent of the Asian vulture crisis of the 1990s.

Hunting on the other hand is caused by vultures being used by people in traditional medicine and cultural beliefs and as a food source, particularly in West and southern Africa.

[20] Many West and southern African cultures believe vulture body parts cure a range of physical and mental illnesses, improve success in gambling and business ventures, or increase intelligence in children.

It is suspected that they died after eating the carcasses of 3 elephants that were poisoned by poachers, possibly to avoid detection by the birds, which help rangers to track poaching activity by circling over the locations of dead animals.

[21][22][23][24] The species may also be threatened by avian influenza (H5N1), from which it appears to suffer some mortality and which it probably acquires from feeding on discarded dead poultry.

[6] Raptors are protected in many West African and Northeastern countries and in South Africa under the United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), in the Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation of Migratory Birds of Prey in Africa and Eurasia (the ‘Raptors MoU’).