Decline of Vulture Population in India and Africa

What is the mystery behind so many vultures dying off in India and Africa? Not many people are aware of this fact but vultures, particularly in India, are now driven to the brink of extinction. This has happened very fast; in a matter of just a couple of decades. Another fact that people are not cognizant of is that the loss of vultures and cockroaches actually threatens the well-being of the human population. For cultural and religious reasons, most people in India avoid eating beef. Cows are considered sacred and hence not slaughtered so easily in abattoirs. Cows are actually revered; they are mostly employed in pulling carts and ploughs, giving milk and producing dung that is used for fuel and fertilisers. Slaughtering cattle is considered taboo in India but it is fast changing in the past few decades. Aged cattle are usually allowed to die their natural deaths and their carcasses are generally left in open fields or taken to dump locations for vultures and several other scavengers to feed on them and consume them. Everyone knows that India’s population has soared to the skies during the last century; its herds of goats, cows, water buffaloes and other livestock have also gone up. The number of vultures also went up by the nineteen eighties and was close to forty million. Airports started complaining the vultures were creating a nuisance to the flights taking off, quoting that almost thirty per cent of planes that were hit by birds; which were all vultures. The civil aviation departments even thought of hiring people to shoot down vultures hovering around the aerodromes. So, how did the number of vultures decline? Some of the theories include death on account of electrocution on power lines, being hunted and dying from radiation generated from the mobile towers emitting 3G-5G waves. Some vultures have died for feeding on lead bullets within the flesh of the carrion. The habitats of vultures have also been shrinking for these past couple of decades. The major factor that filters out is the advent of cell phone towers. There has been concern about the reduction of forests where the vultures bred and made their nests. Today, forget about the forty million figure; not only the vultures, even the black crows and sparrows have disappeared and you can find them once in a blue moon. As per research done, there has been a rapid decline in the population of vultures in India between 1986 and 1999. It has been noted that the white-backed vulture has suffered mostly with adult mortality along with breeding failure. The source of the research report is the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Another variety that has declined sharply is the long-billed vulture. This rapid decline is somewhat of a mystery as there has been no scarcity of food in parks; abandoned cows have continued to wander the grounds and died. Healthy cows have also sometimes died after getting stuck in the marshes, providing access to food for vultures. It was observed that against the scenario prior to 1985, now out of hundred carcasses, only eight had vultures on them. Theoretically, disease or poisoning could be the culprit but evidence is lacking. Vultures produce highly corrosive stomach acids, allowing them to happily consume highly toxic bacteria such as anthrax. It has been seen that they seemed fine after eating the carcasses of cows that had been poisoned with a rodenticide. There are reports of vultures dying in South Africa after eating strychnine-laced cow or sheep carcasses. Such incidents are few and far between and cannot be the cause of population crash in vultures. Environmental pesticides could conceivably be killing birds or disrupting reproduction but tissue samples from dead vultures did not show significant pesticide loads. A team of investigators assembled by the Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit conservation organisation, arrived across the border in Pakistan in 2000 A.D. to investigate the deaths of vultures. What they would discover, after years of frustrating research, is that the very reverence for cows that had allowed vultures to flourish in India had subsequently led to their near-extinction across the region. A weird confluence of cultural practices, technological advancement and unique avian vulnerability caused a crisis that ranks among the worst human-caused wildlife die-offs in history. While the vulture deaths were inexplicable at first, they bring to mind past bird population declines whose causes were at least well understood. The dodo had succumbed to habitat destruction and predators introduced to its native island of Mauritius in the seventeenth century and its story later sustained a new understanding that animals actually could go extinct in clear defiance of God’s natural order. More recently, the passenger pigeon of North America numbered in the billions until humans wiped it out through massive hunting and deforestation. The species’ numbers faded gradually at first and then more rapidly until the last one perished in a zoo in 1914 A.D. In most cases, unintentional poisoning has played an important role in reducing the population of these birds. The condors consumed lead bullets in dead carcasses and this has shortened their livelihood by several years. It has been known in Africa that farmers have set out poisoned carcasses to kill leopards, lions and hyenas that hunted their cattle. In the same way, vultures have also fed on the tainted meat and died in great numbers. Even in Israel, the Druze and Bedouin farmers have also poisoned jackals, wolves and wild boars with destructive results. This has been confirmed by an avian ecologist with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Vultures actually aggregate in large numbers as they like to forage together and they nest in colonies. Hence, when there is a poisoning incidence, it usually takes out several hundreds of birds. Humans have not realised that such incidents will drive their numbers close to extinction. Conservationists who are working to protect vultures have to contend with not only a variety of environmental threats but also with public indifference laced with hostility and fear. Hostility has been a result of watching them circle above a wanderer in dry lands who is parched with thirst as he or she struggles. The vultures tend to settle near him or her as he or she weakens. On the first sign of collapse, the vultures will tend to converge on that person and attack by means of pecking at the flesh and even the eyes. These birds are symbolic of gluttony and take delight in consuming weak cattle and humans. Hostility has also arisen from the fact that vultures, with their featherless and bare heads, tend to look gross and ugly. Charles Darwin wrote once after seeing a turkey buzzard in 1835 in Chile that `it is a disgusting bird with its bald and scarlet head bent to wallow in putridity.’ It is known to man that vultures are specialists in finding dead bodies and carcasses that could be decomposed remains of even a few days. They emerge away from the carcasses with their beaks and mouths smeared with bacteria and blood. They have been found to defecate on to their legs. When they are threatened, turkey vultures take out stinky and acidic vomit to drive way other predators. Charles Darwin wrote about vultures, “When the condors are wheeling in a flock round and round any spot, their flight is beautiful; it is truly wonderful and beautiful to see these birds, hour after hour, without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and river.” Vultures are on a constant search for carrion, swiftly stripping it bare before the decaying flesh can become a breeding ground for disease. For centuries, a Zoroastrian community in India called the Parsis, as well as Vajrayana Buddhists in Tibet, disposed of their dead through `sky burials’, setting them out in high places where vultures and other birds quickly turned the bodies into bare skeletons. The health impact of the vulture decline, including treatment costs, loss of life and lost income, has been estimated at $34 billion just for the period from 1993 to 2006, which does not include spending for carcass management and disposal, loss of tourism dollars and environmental impact. Findings to determine cause of decline in population of vultures Most investigators had thought the reason could perhaps be an infectious disease, but it soon became clear to the research team that vultures were dying in clusters; this suggested exposure to a lethal toxin. In one of the first birds they examined, the internal organs were covered with a chalky paste - indicating visceral gout, a result of kidney failure. People and animals develop gout when they don’t properly metabolise purines, which are nitrogen-containing compounds that are commonly found in meat products. The body turns purines into uric acid, which birds normally excrete in their white poop, which is also the avian kind of urine. The researchers soon found many more dead vultures with gout and tested them for a long list of toxins, including heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium and commonly used insecticides. They looked for unusual bacteria and viruses, conducting DNA tests. Yet after two years of intense and expensive study, they identified nothing that could be causing such deaths, except for a common culprit. The Culprit – Painkillers - An innovation that turned fatal Diclofenac is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) which is used vastly to treat inflammation and pain, especially from rheumatoid and other kinds of arthritis. The investigators found Diclofenac in the dead vultures with kidney failure they had tested. This pain killer was present in the buffalo meat the birds had fed on before they died. To make sure of what they were arriving at, they injected diclofenac into few buffaloes and fed the meat to four captive birds, three of whom died of visceral gout within three days. The mystery was finally solved. The drug had been introduced in 1973 by Ciba-Geigy, a Swiss company that later became part of Novartis. There is an irony to the role of diclofenac in the vulture catastrophe; it had been specifically created to provide a less toxic alternative to aspirin and synthetic NSAIDs available at that time. In 1964, Alfred Sallmann and other chemists at Ciba-Geigy began studying existing NSAIDs, measuring their acidity, chemical structure and ability to dissolve in fat; all qualities that prove how well a substance is absorbed, binds with body receptors and is excreted. Scientists who studied Diclofenac’s safety and its effectiveness were aware that NSAIDs affect purine metabolism and they knew that interfering with those biological pathways could cause overproduction of uric acid and result in dangerous gout. However, in laboratory tests, Diclofenac or Voltaren, as Ciba-Geigy tagged the drug, seemed to have little effect on the enzymes involved in purine metabolism. For decades, Diclofenac was used mainly for arthritis in humans, but around 1994 in India and 1998 in Pakistan, veterinarians began using it to treat sick domestic water buffalo and cattle, usually by injection. It was cheap and effective; its patent had expired and it was manufactured by more than fifty companies in India. Diclofenac allowed rural families to treat their domestic animals’ pains so that they could continue working. People were happy with the results they were seeing. In Hindu culture, cow is treated as a mother, for it gives milk. Cows are of great value and they also plow the fields and provide milk. In case of cows, when they are given Diclofenac, the drug tends to break down fast and it becomes undetectable in the body after several days. It was an unfortunate reaction that the vultures developed severe gout as they became sensitive to Diclofenac as blood flow in their kidneys got reduced. Their organs malfunctioned and they could not get the uric acid removed from the blood, leading to gout and death. The vultures, being scavengers, fly high and spot carcasses of cows and buffaloes over large distances and dozens of them may descend on a body and strip it clean in very less time. They would also die within days as a result of infected cows. Deaths in vulture colonies are outpacing births. Mostly, vultures do not breed until they are five or six years old and the females will lay an egg a year and that also may or may not hatch. Mathematical models suggest that even one contaminated carcass can bring down the vulture population by about ten percent in a year. What action could be taken? Governments of India and Nepal convened a summit concerned by the rapidly declining vulture population. The summit was organised by the Peregrine Fund and various other groups to discuss damage control and recovery strategies. The government agencies were directed to stop veterinary Diclofenac in India, Nepal and Pakistan. Researchers suggested a safe alternative in Meloxicam after testing on vultures. Armed with the evidence that diclofenac had ravaged South Asian vulture populations, the Peregrine Fund and other groups convened summits in Nepal and India to prepare recovery plans. Conservation organisations educated government agencies, leading to bans on manufacturing of veterinary diclofenac in India, Nepal, and Pakistan in 2006. To encourage vets not to simply turn to other potentially dangerous NSAIDs, such as flunixin or ibuprofen, researchers identified a safe alternative, meloxicam, which they successfully tested in vultures. At first, the number of birds continued to fall every year. India did not ban actual sales of veterinary Diclofenac until 2008 and even allowed human Diclofenac products, which could be easily diverted for use in livestock. Large vials of Diclofenac remained available in pharmacies for several more years. While vets did begin to prescribe Meloxicam, its higher cost and lesser effectiveness slowed adoption. Other veterinary NSAIDs that kill vultures, such as ketoprofen, remain available in most of South Asia to this day. Finally, around 2011, the population of white-backed vultures stabilised, according to a study by Vibhu Prakash, the biologist who first documented the birds’ decline in Keoladeo Park, two decades earlier. Of the nine species of vultures that live in or visit India during migration, four are classified as critically endangered across their ranges: the white-backed, the Indian or long-billed, the red-headed and the slender-billed vultures. In the early 1990s, at least forty million vultures and possibly more lived in India; by 2015, the combined number of Indian, white-backed and slender-billed species has plummeted to somewhere about nineteen thousand in the country. To boost the chances of survival of these vultures, a captive breeding program was established and India now has five centres like these, holding more than six-hundred birds. The process is expensive, labor intensive and painfully slow. Success is not guaranteed as the vultures could still go extinct although breeding programs in California and Europe have been able to preserve threatened populations. A centre in Nepal released eight captive-bred vultures in September 2018 and it was the first such effort in South Asia. The Indian centres released their first captive-bred birds later. Diclofenac bans are now strictly enforced around the breeding centres and in safe zones that have been established in several locations across the region. In Nepal, six `Jatayu’ restaurants offer Diclofenac-free meals for the vultures. These programs buy old cattle or receive donated animals, allow them to die naturally, skin them for the leather and leave the carcasses out for vultures to safely consume. While it is difficult to ensure the meat is completely free of toxins, similar centres operate in India, Pakistan and Cambodia. The Long Battle Ahead India is not the only country where conservationists are labouring to protect minuscule bird populations. Israel, which about a hundred years ago had several thousand vultures, now has about one hundred and eighty resident Eurasian griffons along with hundred Egyptian vultures that migrate there in the summer, according to Hatzofe, the avian ecologist who oversees the country’s vulture protection programs. Israel’s wildlife agency now breeds vultures and releases them. It imports birds that are rehabilitated from places like Spain, tracks their whereabouts with GPS, stocks about thirty feeding sites with drug-free carcasses and protects individual nests that have eggs, subsequently chicks. Over and above these efforts, the agency also works to prevent aircraft collisions, researches emerging threats and supports public-education programs, as per Hatzofe. Staff members use helicopters to locate dead cows and have four trucks that clear almost three hundred tons of dead animals every year that include camels, sheep and cattle. This helps stem the overabundance of jackals, foxes, feral dogs and wild boars that feed on them. The government collects the carcasses and works with Druze and Bedouin shepherds to discourage them from involving poisons to protect their herds. Every bunch of unintentional vulture poisonings is a serious blow in a country that has so few of these birds; without the process of captive breeding and release, Israel’s vulture population would certainly decline further, Hatzofe said. Adaptation is the key here. With such a brittle population and varied collection of threats, there is no guarantee that numbers will increase steadily. Traditionally, they have fluctuated radically. Israel had at least a thousand pairs of Eurasian griffons in the early part of the twentieth century, which declined to just about eighty pairs in the early 1980s, as a result of food shortage, poisoning, electrocution on power lines, nest disturbances and poaching, as per the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. By the 1990s, with the help of conservation programs, the population has recovered to one hundred and fifty breeding pairs. Mathematical modeling has suggested that as few as one in every seven hundred and sixty, contaminated carcasses could drive down the vulture population by thirty per cent every year. Things are up and down in India The news from the Indian pharmaceutical scene is that companies are manufacturing diclofenac on a large scale for human use in vials and they are so large that part of it is being conserved still to treat livestock. This has been reported by Toby Galligan, a conservation scientist from Royal Society for Protection of Birds. Many veterinarians and livestock owners persist on choosing diclofenac over the other drug, meloxicam, which is not so dangerous for vultures. The suggestion given by Galligan is sensible when he instructs that diclofenac be allowed to be sold for use for human use but with limit to vials that are not bigger than four milliliters, making it harder to use in veterinary settings. This suggestion needs to be put into immediate practice if the vulture population is expected to survive in India. Pessimists do not give much hope as they feel that the vultures would disappear within a generation from India. As per an ornithologist, Prakash Javadekar, the vulture population in India has declined in a matter of three decades from 40,000,000 to just over 19,000. The breakup of this figure as per the Union Environment Minister is as follows – there are six thousand white-backed vultures left, twelve thousand long-billed vultures and one thousand slender-billed vultures left. The efforts of the vulture breeding centres that have been established for their conservation in various states have been in vain, mostly. The respective government heads of these states have released money in excess of 125 million Rupees towards vulture conservation. Vulture Population Prospects in Africa Prospects for vultures are also calamitous in Africa. A 2015 survey of ninety-five vulture populations in twenty-two African countries found that eighty-nine per cent of the population had suffered major decline or disappeared entirely over the last few decades. Sixty-one percent of recorded deaths were due to poisoning, twenty-nine to capture for trade in traditional medicine, nine to electrocution or collision with electrical infrastructure and one per cent to killing for food. Many countries are short of vigorous programs to fight these problems, some of which are degenerating. Trade in vulture parts appears to be rising and an American aid program is bringing electrical lines to more of sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, the main reasons for the decline in population has been attributed to poisoning of vultures, urbanization, a rise in demand for vultures in witchcraft apart from electrocution by power lines and getting crushed by wind turbines. Vultures such as Ruppell’s Griffon are being threatened everyday by poaching, urban development and poisoning. At the current rate of decline, vultures are collapsing towards total extinction in Africa. There are eight vulture species in Africa and they have declined in number by about sixty-two per cent during the last three decades. This has been announced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Assistant Director of African Programs for the Peregrine Fund, an Idaho-based no-profit organisation that is dedicated to saving birds of prey, mentioned that vultures have to be treated as one of the most important scavengers in nature. He was disturbed when he proclaimed that such natural recyclers that breed slowly and who require many years to mature are at the point of extinction in the next five decades. When a large predator in Africa such as a lion kills livestock, the respective farmer will often coat the carcass with poison to take revenge on that predator. This is a practice which is illegal but it is rarely prosecuted. Instead of the predator, it is the vultures that usually get to the corpse before anyone else and eventually to the poison. Pesticides are abused and poorly regulated in Africa. They are sometimes sold as `lion killers’ in many African countries. Many farmers use these pesticides, intentionally. This is the principal reason as per David Allan, curator of birds at the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa why vultures have mainly disappeared from the commercial farming regions in the African continent where pesticides are routinely used. Rapid urbanisation is also affecting the population of vultures in Africa as they are being displaced from their habitat. A sharp increase in wind farming across this continent has become a cause for concern as the vultures are often colliding with these turbines. The poachers are another danger as they are busy selling body parts of vultures to people dabbling in witchcraft. These idiots feel that through the vulture’s eyes, they are able to see into the future. In Africa, keeping a check on the vulture population is not an easy task as it may be in India perhaps because in the former, different countries are involved with various cultures. The vultures are facing different threats. Take, for example, the vulture population in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, Africa. The vultures there get much less attention than the apex predators and the wild game. Also, they are all threatened by the poison which is set out for them as a result of their attacks on livestock. However, there are several organisations connected with wild game reserve monitoring that train game scouts to respond to reports of carcasses which are poisoned before too many vultures feed on them and die. When a poisoning does get reported, the trained conservationists who are mostly Masai themselves approach the aggrieved farmer and listen to their complaints. Then, they discuss options. A particular group called the `Big Life Foundation’ keeps a fund to compensate such farmers. Complete cessation of poisoning is not possible but it can be checked and reduced so that the vulture population can grow gradually. It is going to take time as well as effort and it is not so easy. The slow but sure signs of the population growth in vultures in India show that societies could change if they wanted to and in ways that will allow these birds a possibility of a brighter future. A recent study done on vultures and cattle carcasses since 2010 has shown that the treatment with diclofenac has dropped by forty-nine per cent and researchers have extrapolated this information to conclude that there has been a corresponding decline on vulture deaths based on their feeding behaviour and that number is by almost sixty-five per cent. It is not something to dance about but it is certainly a step in the correct direction. The Race to save African Vultures A dozen species of African vultures are in the category of population freefall, meaning they are hunted for cultural uses or felled by poisons meant for lions. Conservationists and local people are moving quickly to stop the damage. While they may not have the same intrinsic majesty of say a pride of lions or a racing cheetah, a kettle of vultures feeding at a carcass on the African savanna is every bit as symbolic of that continent as the graceful, credible gait of a giraffe. What’s more, vultures play a significantly important ecological role and hence, the reason for grave alarm among conservationists about the growing decline of Africa’s once-flourishing vulture populations. Already, the vultures are the most threatened group of raptors in the world, which is why, in some respects, the related crisis in Africa feels like the repeat of a nightmare that played out in South Asia in the 1990s. There, vulture populations, especially in India, Pakistan, and Nepal rapidly disintegrated after farmers began treating their livestock with a cheap non-ste¬roidal anti-inflammatory pain reliever (NSAID) called diclofenac, which eases aches and increases milk yields. It has also, however, astonishingly toxic to many vultures that feed on the carcasses of livestock treated with it. By 2007, vulture populations in India had dropped by as much as 99.9%, and by only slightly less apocalyptic rates else¬where in the region. Frantic, last-ditch efforts like cap¬tive-breeding programs and campaigns to stop the veterinary use of NSAIDs have stabilised the vulture population in Asia today, at least somewhat. A similar collapse is playing out across Africa with different driving forces that make the situation challenging and perhaps more hopeful for those trying to stave off another vulture disaster. Seventy Per Cent of African Vulture Species are endangered Seven of Africa’s ten vulture species are now listed as endangered or critically endangered, with some populations falling by as much as 97% in the last few years. The steepest declines have occurred in West and East Africa and have even hit protected areas such as parks, with White-headed and Egyptian Vultures and Rüppell’s and Cape Griffon populations dropping the fastest. The list of threats to vultures in Africa is long and complex: NSAID poi¬soning, habitat loss, electrocution and collision with a rap¬idly growing power grid infrastructure, ingestion of lead ammunition from feeding on animals killed by hunters and human disturbance at breeding col¬onies, including egg-collecting and rec¬reational rock-climbing. Food scarcity is also a problem for vultures, especially in West Africa, where large-mammal populations have fallen 60% since 1970. Vultures are frequently the unintended victims of livestock growers who illegally use pesticide-laced car¬casses to kill off predators that threaten their herds, such as lions, jackals, and hyenas. Poisoning accounts for more than 60% of the vulture deaths in Africa, every year. “A lot of the things that affect vultures are not aimed at vultures,” said Darcy Ogada, Assistant Director of Africa Pro¬grams for the Peregrine Fund and lead author of a 2016 paper in the Journal Conservation Letters that pushed Africa’s vulture problem into the global limelight. Ogada says that the biggest threats to African vultures come when poisons are aimed directly at them. In particular, a growing trade in vulture body parts for traditional belief-based use (mostly as good-luck charms) uses poisons like carbamate pesticides as the preferred method of killing. “In southern Africa and parts of West Africa, people believe the use of vulture parts provides you with a degree of clairvoyance,” explains André Botha, the Vultures for Africa Program Man¬ager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust. The myth that vultures use clairvoyance to find faraway carcasses has led to the belief that consuming vulture parts can con¬vey extra sensory perception to humans. “People tend to use it for betting and gambling, but we also know examples where people used it to predict the outcome of exams,” he says. Although there is a modest food market for smoked vulture meat, most buyers simply want to possess part of a vulture, especially the head, believing it will improve success in business, raise the intelligence quotient of children, cure a variety of illnesses and generally bring good luck and ward off evil. The decline of White-backed Vultures from Nigeria has been blamed on belief-based trade in that country. The most shocking examples of poisoning for trade, though, have occurred in Guinea-Bissau, where more than 2,000 Hooded Vultures, a species already listed as critically endangered, have been killed since 2019. Hundreds of poisoned vultures have been found at a single site, many without their heads. Given that this small West African country holds about 43,000 Hooded Vultures, more than a fifth of the world’s population, the losses have seriously worried conser¬vationists, who see trade connections to larger and more populous countries like Nigeria as driving the demand. Botha notes that the use of vulture parts as charms has a long history, with hunters using traditional means to kill vultures. “But now, using modern pesticides, single incidents can kill hundreds and, as in the case of Guinea-Bissau, even thousands of birds,” he says. While belief uses are strongest in West Africa, the practice has a sizable foothold in southern Africa, Botha says. Experts see a disturbing rise in East Africa as well. “The sort of good vulture pop¬ulations remaining in West Africa probably won’t stay that way for very long,” Ogada warns, with the economic turmoil and job losses of the COVID-19 pandemic adding fresh incentives for people to monetise vulture populations. Ogada says that African vultures are being targeted in a type of sentinel poisoning, a common practice in which elephant or rhino poachers dose a carcass with toxins to preemptively kill off vultures so there are no gathering flocks of birds circling above an illegal kill. The increase in elephant poaching in the early 2000s drew international attention but no one notices that ele¬phant poachers also killed enormous numbers of vultures. Most notable among several incidents is that as many as five hundred vultures died at a single poisoned carcass at a national park in Namibia. More than one hundred and fifty vultures were killed at a dosed elephant body at Kruger National Park in South Africa. In most cases, swift decomposition meant that conservationists were unable to conclude exactly which species of vultures were involved. Sentinel poisoning is an issue that is much beyond the control of vulture conservationists as Per Mr. Ogada of the Peregrine Fund. Whereas sentinel poisoning accounted for about a third of the vultures killed in Africa each year in the early 2010s, Ogada says sentinel poisoning has decreased significantly in some countries, thanks to international pressure and stronger enforcement on elephant poaching. A Reason for Hope For all the bad news, conservationists have taken heart from the fact that the decline in African vultures has been slower than the extraordinarily rapid collapse that occurred in Asia, which has given them time to rally around and respond. They recognise the task of saving the great scavengers of their continent will not be that easy. Some Africans view vultures with superstitious fear and very few understand their ecological importance; which is why, vulture specialists are fighting back with their education and training. Through the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s poisoning intervention pro¬gram that was started by Botha, his colleagues along with him have trained more than two thousand conservation rangers, law enforcement officers and veterinarians in southern Africa to detect and prevent wildlife poisoning events. Botha has worked with Ogada to begin similar training in Kenya, where the Peregrine Fund has started collaborating with a non-profit group called `Lion Landscapes’ to offer a two-part education program for communities. Participants spend one day learning about the dangers of poisons and the importance of vultures; on the second day, they learn about how to build better livestock corrals, known as `bomas’, out of chain-link fences and sturdy gates. Better bomas leads to lesser instances of wandering livestock being lost to predators. This will motivate lesser incentive for communi¬ties to poison lions, hyenas and vultures that feed on poisoned bait or poisoned predators. Since 2019, this collaboration has facilitated the building of three hundred such corrals. There have been other important signs of progress. In 2020, a multi-species action plan was drafted under the sponsorship of the United Nations’ Convention on Migratory Species, covering all sixteen species of African and Eurasian vultures. It was endorsed by one hundred and twenty-eight 128 countries in the world from Europe, Asia and Africa. Botha was serving as the coordinator for that plan. It sets targets for reducing and eliminating several kinds of poisoning, focusing on protected areas and buffers. The plan also focused on international efforts to eliminate the veterinary use of NSAIDs and called for the identification of areas where electrical infrastructure, including proposed wind farms, posed the highest risk to vultures. This Convention on Migratory Species and Wild Animals came to an agreement for testing of all NSAIDs for vulture toxicity, the withdrawal from veterinary use of NSAIDs that are toxic and vulture-safety testing for new drugs. Another approach that has shown promise is the creation of Vulture Safe Zones, or VSZs. This is a technique that was pioneered in Asia in which a buffer was created around a vulture population strong¬hold. Within VSZs, use of diclofenac was aggressively fought against and drug-free carcasses were provided at vulture- feeding stations. Botha felt that many African vulture species are actively mobile over large areas every day. With more than fifty countries on the African conti¬nent, a single vulture may cross three or four international boundaries on a single daily foraging flight. For that reason, African conserva¬tionists are turning to the creation of multinational VSZs, overlapping the borders of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana. In this area, the largest breeding colony of Cape Griffons could be found. Sometimes, you will find about one thousand four hundred birds nesting in a single colony in some of these zones. There are also considerable populations of vultures that are tree-nesting. About three hundred pairs of whte-backed vultures nest in the riparian vegetation along the Limpopo River that forms the border between three countries. The safe zones encompass close to twelve thousand square miles area. About eighty per cent of that is private land and that includes many private game reserves. Conservationists are working with private landowners within these Vulture Safe Zones and they include companies like DeBeers Diamond Company. National, local and provincial governments are working together to boost the existing legal protection for these vultures. Energy companies are also making sure that they reduce the risks of electrocution and power-line collisions. Some conservationists are also looking to explore anti-poisoning interventions and use of supplementary feeding stations to offer vultures with a food supply that is safe. They are likely to be successful to serve as models for trans-national zones alike in most parts of the African Continent like the Masai Mara in Kenya where the vultures follow the migrating game herds across the boundaries. The scale of the challenge is huge. There is a lot more of work that needs to be done but the way the things are being done looks promising. Summary Vultures are nature's most successful scavengers and they provide a vast collection of ecological and cultural services. Vultures are the only known coercive birds that have uniquely adapted to a scavenging lifestyle. Vultures' unique adaptations include soaring flight, keen eyesight and extremely low pH levels in their stomachs. Presently, about seven vulture species worldwide are threatened with extinction and the most rapid declines have occurred in the vulture-rich regions of Asia and Africa. The reasons for the decline in their population are varied, but poisoning or human persecution, or both, feature in the list of nearly every declining species. Deliberate poisoning of carnivores is likely the most widespread cause of vulture poisoning. In Asia, Gyps vultures have declined by more than almost ninety-five per cent due to poisoning by the diclofenac, which was banned for veterinary use by regional governments in 2006. It is still used for humans as a painkiller. Human persecution of vultures has occurred for centuries and shooting and deliberate poisoning are the most widely practiced activities. Ecological effects of vulture decline include changes in community composition of scavengers at carcasses and an increased potential for disease transmission between mammalian scavengers at carcasses. There have been cultural and economic costs of vulture decline also, particularly in Asia. As a result of disastrous vulture decline in Asia, regional governments, the international scientific and donor communities and the media have given the crisis considerable attention. Even though the Asian vulture crisis focused also on the plight of vultures worldwide, the situation for African vultures has received relatively little attention, especially given the similar levels of population decline. While the Asian crisis has been largely linked to poisoning by diclofenac, vulture population declines in Africa have numerous causes, which have made protecting existing populations more difficult. In Africa, there has been little government support to conserve vultures in spite of increasing evidence of major threats. In other regions with successful vulture protection programs, a common result is a large investment of financial resources and highly skilled personnel as well as political agenda and community support. Citations 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22175274/ 2. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/the-race-to-save-african-vultures/# 3. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/poison-pill-the-mysterious-die-off-of-indias-vultures/ 4. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150731-vultures-africa-birds-animals-science 5. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/indian-vultures-are-dying-for-some-good-news/ 6. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/sharp-decline-in-vulture-population-from-40-million-to-19000-prakash-javadekar/article61590972.ece/amp/ ***********