Have You Seen A Vulture Off Late??
At first, no one noticed they were missing. Vultures—gangly creatures
seen with their heads buried in rotting flesh on roadsides, on the
banks of the Ganga, lining the high walls and spires of every temple and
tower—were once so ubiquitous in India as to be taken for granted,
invisible in their abundance. Cross-culturally, they tend to be
considered uncharismatic. Their pronounced brows make for permanent
scowls and some have blunt beaks so strong they can splinter bone. In
South Asia, their broad wings can reach upto eight feet tip to tip,
casting a great shadow from above as they circle, drawn by the distant
sight of carrion. Associated with death, we instinctually look away.
But for all of human history, vultures have served India faithfully.
They scoured the countryside, clearing fields of dead cows and goats.
They soared over the cities in search of the scattered refuse of the
region’s ever-expanding populace. For a place where religious and
cultural mores restrict the handling of the dead—human and animal alike,
for both Hindus and Muslims—vultures served as a natural, efficient and
underappreciated disposal system. On the Towers of Silence in Mumbai,
they were an integral part of the death rites for Parsis, who lay out
their dead for the vultures to consume in a ritual known as a ‘sky
burial’. In Delhi, they flocked to city dumpsites: one photograph in the
archives of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), India’s largest
and oldest wildlife conservation organisation, captures 6,000 vultures
in a single frame; another shows 200 vultures on one animal carcass.
But, today, India’s vultures are virtually gone. The three dominant
South Asian Gyps vultures—slender-billed, white-backed, and
long-billed—started dying mysteriously in the 1990s; by 2003, scientists
had isolated the cause. Vultures that ingest carcasses treated with
diclofenac, a mild painkiller akin to such harmless curatives as aspirin
and ibuprofen, develop untreatable kidney failure that kills them
within weeks. Commonly used by humans worldwide for decades to control
pain, Indians began using the drug on their livestock in the early
1990s. The effect on the vultures was immediate—dead birds literally
falling from trees.
The Indian government banned the sale of diclofenac for veterinary
purposes in 2006, but it was already too late. In less than ten years,
vulture numbers had plummeted by 97-99 per cent. Scientists began using
terms such as ‘functionally extinct’ and said they were ‘monitoring to
extinction’. BNHS immediately set up captive breeding facilities, and
the Parsis have settled on solar re.ectors directed at the bodies to
speed up the process of decay, but a larger issue remains. Nature abhors
a vacuum. With the vultures nearly gone, what has filled the ecological
niche they once filled so seamlessly?
Dog attacks in India are on the rise. Two young girls survived an
assault in the city of Bikaner in the Thar desert of western Rajasthan,
but a four-year-old boy named Manjunath in Bangalore, for example, did
not. One study figured that 70 per cent of the world’s rabies deaths
occur in India, where there are more than 17 million dog bites every
year. In the decade of major vulture decline, from 1992 to 2003, one
estimate showed dog populations increasing by a third, up to nearly 30
million. The escalation of the dog population corresponds perfectly with
the disappearance of India’s vultures.
Rameshewar lives at Jorbeer, a 100 yards from a five-acre pile of
animal carcasses. When I met the lanky man, he was wearing a thin
button-down shirt that had a neat tear in the back. He looked young, no
older than 30, though his wife was already matronly with motherhood.
“I’ve been here four years,” Rameshewar said. “I live here with my
wife and four children. These are my four goats, which we keep for
milking. Tractors come every day carrying carcasses…”
The family lives at the edge of the carcass dump at Jorbeer on the
outskirts of Bikaner. It is a convenient place for the city to bring its
dead cows, water buffalo, goats and camels, and spots like this are
appearing at the edge of every city and village in India, especially
since the vultures no longer arrive to dispose of bodies
in situ. Feral dogs come to feast.
Forest officials who live far from Jorbeer had insisted there was so
much food provided by the daily delivery of carcasses that the dogs had
no reason to be ‘mischievous’, that they had no reason to ever leave.
Pandevi, who lived with the dogs, disagreed. For every ounce of
Rameshewar’s leanness, his wife Pandevi was full and round. “Many go and
roam, two-three kilometres from Jorbeer,” she said, her voice raspy.
“In the late night, I am very afraid of the dogs. If I have to go out
at night for the toilet, I take a stick,” she said. “During the day, we
carry a stone, but most of them know us and it’s usually okay. But at
night, and when they are in the mating season, they are different.”
“If... there is no one with our animals, and there have not been
fresh carcasses, they will attack the goats,” Rameshewar added. “A few
months ago, the dogs killed two of them.” I looked at the four remaining
goats that hovered behind him as he gestured to a circle of thorny
branches layered four feet thick that served as a corral for the
livestock during the night.
“I’ve seen the number of birds go up,” he continued, “but I’ve also
seen the dogs coming every day, more and more. In the morning, the dogs
can get very restless when the new bodies come in. They’re hungry from
the night. We have to fight them off as we unload.”
There are still birds, but none are as efficient as the vultures once
were. Overhead, hundreds of birds kettled in slow circles in the
sky—mostly Eurasian griffons, bulky steppe eagles and Egyptian vultures
the size of large gulls—all riding the warm whorl of desert thermals to
the top of the gyre without a single flap of their wide wings and then
peeling off like a slowly cascading waterfall. The white-backed and
long-billed hardest hit by diclofenac were noticeably absent. In the
past six years, only one had been seen. As far as scientists can
determine, diclofenac hasn’t affected these scavengers, but their eating
habits are noticeably different from the Gyps vultures, which clean up
in a way that dogs and other scavengers simply cannot. They are
hyper-efficient in their jobs. After skinners strip the hide, whether at
a dumpsite or on the agricultural lands that cover much of India,
vultures can pick the skeleton perfectly clean so the bone collectors
can gather their product for industrial use. The other scavenging birds
prefer eyeballs and internal organs, leaving behind much of the meat,
and they like to clasp bits in their beaks and fly off, messily
scattering the remains and increasing disease risk. Dogs, too, leave
much behind, making the task of the bone collectors, already unpleasant
work, that much more difficult.
Vultures, by consuming the dead, often in places where they lie, also
help contain diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis and
foot-and-mouth by inactivating these pathogens, some of which can remain
transmittable for months after a host organism’s death. A combination
of strong stomach acids and body temperatures over a hundred degrees
Fahrenheit mean vultures can even ingest an anthrax-infected carcass and
suffer no ill effects. For the vultures to be unaffected by some of the
most virulent diseases of our time, yet killed by a drug as innocuous
as aspirin, is no small irony. The fear is that with vultures gone, and
the human handling of dead livestock increasing, these diseases could
spread among both animal and human populations.
But the most dangerous shift in the ecological landscape is that dogs
have a proclivity for perceiving livestock, wild animals and small
children as prey. The vultures, as necrophages, have no interest in the
living, but dogs are hunters. They will scavenge, but their instincts
are predatory, especially when the spirit of a pack possesses them. At
Jorbeer, I watched them watch the wild gazelles that moved across the
sand, saw their bodies lower into a crouch as they moved in pairs to
circle around the ungulates, witnessed them as their pace quickened and
the prey skittered away. A local veterinary clinic was treating several
livestock animals every day for dog bites, and Rameshewar had already
lost two of his goats. Then there were the two Bikaner girls, poor and
unnamed, as locals told me the story of their attack.
Two days later, I returned to the dump with Jitu Solanki, a local
biologist. He comes to the dump often to watch birds, and is comfortable
around the dogs, but he was protective of me as we stepped out of his
car. He was identifying the different birds we were seeing when the
dogs, suddenly roused, started barking, herding in anticipation of
something we couldn’t detect. He paused, mid-sentence, suddenly alert.
“Do you worry about the dogs?” I asked. He looked at me and said,
“Yes.” He estimated that there were a thousand dogs at the site. “Dogs
are a big problem. They are really too much,” he said. “A few months
ago, they came with tractors and…” He makes a quick whistling sound and a
universal scissoring gesture with his fingers to indicate fixing. “…and
put ID tags on them, so maybe in two years it will work. But they never
kill dogs here.
“Hindu people, you know,” he continued, “there is a lot of god and
all. We have a god we call Bhairava, a reincarnation of Shiva, and his
vehicle is a dog, so people believe that if you kill the dog, Bhairava
will be angry. I like this concept.”
He looked up at the sky and continued, “In Hinduism, for every god
you name, there is a related bird or animal; it’s a nice way to conserve
wildlife. Take the vulture that people relate with death and don’t
like—even this bird is the Hindu god Jatayu, who tried to save Sita when
she was kidnapped. So even the ugly vulture has a place among the
gods.”
There are optimistic indications that an increasing number of farmers
are opting to use the vulture-safe drug meloxicam instead of illegally
using the human form of diclofenac on their livestock. According to a
recent study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, use of
diclofenac on livestock has declined by 50 per cent since pre-ban times.
It is a ray of hope for the vultures of South Asia. If that number can
drop to zero, the South Asian landscape can once again be safe for
vultures.
Then, the offspring of BNHS’s breeding centre and natural remnant
populations will hopefully serve as an avian seed bank that can
repopulate India with the creatures humans neglected to notice until
they disappeared. Should that happen, we might again look them in the
eye, recognise Lord Jatayu, and appreciate the crucial function they
silently serve. It might be the key to keeping vultures from
disappearing permanently from South Asian skies.
This landscape is nestled in the Himalaya
Biodiversity Hotspot. A wide variety of endemic and threatened species
thrive here because of the variations in elevation, climate, vegetation
and habitat type. It is listed among the world’s ten most critical
centres for biodiversity and endemism, with a vast array of floral and
faunal species. Over 220 water bodies are found in Sikkim, fed mostly
with glacial melt water, which also are the main sources for rivers in
the state.
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