A VULTURE CALLED PHOENIX

There is a quiet, restrained joy at the Vulture Conservation Breeding Centre, Pinjore. For India’s first and largest vulture conservation breeding centre, this is an exciting season of firsts. The Pinjore Centre in Haryana, set up with the Bombay Natural History Society, with 124 birds in captivity, is the first one where three species of the critically endangered Asian vultures have attempted breeding. Where first-time baseline data on the once abundant Indian vulture is being documented and a pioneering manual being prepared for other such centres. And this is the first time that two vulture nestlings have survived here. This long.

Phoenix is the name the RSPB have chosen for the White Backed Vulture nestling that survived—and is now three months old. It’s an apt nomenclature. Like the legendary bird that survived all odds, Phoenix is the outcome of long and difficult conservation practice which had the Haryana Government marking a trail through all of India, looking at vultures from other states, nests exposed to the deadly veterinary drug Diclofenac, kite festivals and wild bees. Started seven years ago, the Centre has had nestlings being born before, and then dying within the month or even the week. Because the vanishing vulture, for all the hardy image it conjures up, is a very difficult bird to conserve.

The politics of conservation
When a drug is cheap and easily available, it’s picked up easily—and it’s that much more difficult to phase out. A non steroidal, anti-inflammatory painkiller called Diclofenac, effective for both humans and animals, started becoming popular in the mid-1990’s. Within an estimated decade, the death-dealing drug, traces of which remained in animal carcasses, resulted in the extermination of 99.99 per cent of the scavenging Indian vulture, notably the slender billed vulture, the white backed vulture and the long billed vulture.
But vultures are not pretty birds. And till the last decade, they were still spotted in huge numbers in India. Result: the vulture conservation movement is one that is still gathering steam—and funding. But there is a door that letting in the light. Five years before the Government of India allocated Rs 1 crore (in 2006) to set up vulture conservation and breeding centres in Orissa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, the Pinjore centre was up and running, thanks to the BNHS which realised that something very serious was plaguing the bird once as common as the common crow.
Dr Vibhu Prakash from the BNHS, credited with being the first scientist in India to report Indian vultures were vanishing, approached the Haryana government in 2001 to set up the breeding centre.
“When we first mooted the idea to officials, it was met with jeers. Some considered the bird to be ugly, badbudaar (stinky), and some even thought they were a bad omen and basically not worth the conservation effort. But within the year we realised that the vulture needed our help with massive flocks just vanishing,” says Dr R.D. Jakati, Chief Wildlife Warden, Haryana. He anticipated that working on the vulture issue would only pick up in the following years. “Our state has only 3.5 per cent of forest cover. We have no wildlife to write home about. I wrote to the government that working sincerely on the vulture issue would put Haryana on the world map,” he says. That’s exactly what happened. BNHS, RSPB and the Zoological Society of London came to Pinjore in Haryana for site selection and the project got rolling.
Following a conference in Budapest, which found that Diclofenac traces in animal carcasses was the deadly vulture killer in 2003, the Government in 2006 banned the manufacture of Diclofenac as a veterinary drug. It tested Meloxicam, another drug, as the safe substitute. But three years down the line, there’s a long way to go before the vulture can reclaim its kingdom in the sky. Diclofenac as a human drug, worth Rs 900 crore of business, and notably found as popular painkiller Voveran, has entered the veterinary market. Like in India, Birdlife International has found that unlicensed Diclofenac is being sold in Tanzania, another country that has banned the drug from veterinary use.
“The Government needs to market Meloxicam more aggressively. A halfhearted approach to vulture conservation will not work. The vulture is getting left out of conservation plans. All funds are going for the tiger,” says Dr Vibhu Prakash, principal scientist, BNHS, who looks after the Haryana centre, one in Assam (set up last year) and West Bengal (set up two years ago).
“Diclofenac for human use is a very popular. You get it in tablets, in gel form and as ampules. As long as it is easily available in the market for humans, it will be difficult to stop farmers for using it on cattle. There is also a need to reach out to other people who work with cattle, and not just cattle owners. We need to educate those who work with artificial insemination and milking also and constantly repeat this education,” says Dr Arun A Shah, a Bangalore-based vet with leading conservation NGO Wildlife SOS.
“There might be a ban, but on the ground, there isn’t much awareness on Diclofenac,” says Ravi Aggarwal from Toxicslink.

Of the birds and the bees
One look at the Pinjore centre will quickly dismiss any conservative, conventional wisdom you might have had about the vulture. Vultures look fierce, violent and opportunistic. In reality, they are remarkably shy birds that are supremely sensitive to chemical poisoning.
In North Amercia, the Californian Condor, another vulture subspecies, dies even if it feeds on an animal that has lead in its body from a bullet. A conservation programme has been running since the 1980s. In India, vultures have died rapidly as these birds range up to a 100 km to find food, and up to 200 birds can feed on one carcass. This means that a single diclofenac-injected dead animal can kill hundreds of birds.
A vulture pairs for life and only lays one egg a year which incubates for as long as 55 days. The chick then takes five years to attain adulthood. That narrows down the chances of quick breeding. There are other pecularities as well. It is impossible to tell a male and female vulture apart, unless DNA testing is done. India does not yet have the facilities to carry out these tests, so to put estimates of future chicks with existing captive vultures is very difficult.
At the Pinjore centre too, there’s a long way to go, as 70 per cent of the birds are still juvenile. This is because many of these birds are captured from the wild just before they fledge, or start flying from their nests.
Keeping this bird captive has its own challenges. The vulture is unused to human beings and when its keepers approach, the bird in its nervousness throws up its ingested food and crashes itself against the walls of the cage. As scavengers, the birds are very particular about their cleanliness and need to bathe everyday, and it has to be with freshly topped water. Being captive and unable to soar, vultures can develop a condition called Bumblefoot if they are made to sit on smooth surfaces. Therefore, captive breeders have to make sure that the birds roost on rough surfaces like perches tied with coconut coir. The aviaries are built with bamboo in a way that ensure that the nervous birds cannot see any people outside their enclosures, but no matter how high the structures go, the captive birds cannot be given the sky to soar in.
In a freak accident some years ago, three vultures in Pinjore died in captivity after disturbed wild bees stung the birds on the neck, which is unfeathered and thus unprotected. The Pinjore centre is now compiling its observations to create a manual for other centres.

Marking a trail
Each of the 124 birds at the Pinjore centre tells a story. The research centre started with marking observations on dead birds. “I wrote to all the Chief Wildlife Wardens to send in carcasses of dead vultures. We got dead bodies from Kerala and Madhya Pradesh,” Jakati says. Assam gave Haryana slender billed vultures and Rajasthan gave long billed vultures. From Gujarat, came nearly two scores of birds who had been perilously damaged by nylon kite strings fused with egg and glass during kite festivals. Most of these birds were marred forever, and they have had wings amputated. Following the vulture coming into national focus though, it has become more difficult for Haryana to procure birds from other states.
By 2006, the issue had become so sensitive in India that Meloxicam as a substitute to Diclofenac was tested not on Indian birds but on South African species.
Since many of the birds at Pinjore are still sub adults and thus inexperienced parents, two nestlings born to white backed vultures died after being born last year. This year, the slender billed and long billed both laid eggs but they did not hatch. Nine eggs were laid by white backed vultures, of which two have survived. The first, born four months ago, was christened by the state Environment Minister, and called Vibhu, after the principal scientist, and the second, born three months ago, was of course named Phoenix.

‘Smelly and frightening’
A keeper working with vultures has to live with smells of carcasses, pick up the bones picked clean by the vultures and at times face the bird’s nasty bites. More than anything is the importance of getting used to the intimidating task of cutting up raw mutton and serving the birds. “I used to be scared of vultures before I started working with them. Insects on corpses and the smell was difficult to deal with,” says Timman Singh, 35, a keeper at the Pinjore centre.
“Now I think the birds recognise me. The vultures need our help, without us they can no longer survive. Both the male and the female assume equal responsibility in raising their child, and they remind me of a nuclear human family. People in my village in Rajasthan now call me ‘gidhwala’ (vulture man).” But it’s not been easy. “Vultures are strong birds and can weigh up to 5 kg. Once I got distracted while catching a fledgling and it bit me very hard.” But it has been worth it. Singh says he never wants to see the day when he tells his kids “yeh gidh tha (that used to be the vulture)”.

Others just aren’t good enough
Wildlife experts point out that the loss of the vulture has resulted in the proliferation of poor, disease spreading substitutes in the ecosystem. The vulture, once the most prominent and efficacious scavenger, has been ‘replaced’—poorly so—by pariah kites, jackals, dogs and rats. While rats spread diseases like plague after feeding on carcasses, dogs posit a more imminent problem. Dogs in both urban and rural spaces have turned feral, and have started hunting in packs, after feeding on raw meat from carcasses. In Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary near Delhi, one pack of dogs started hunting nilgai, while another pack in Panchkula, Haryana, started preying on deer, sambar and goral.
“Though people in urban areas don’t really notice the local extinction of the vulture, farmers in rural areas have registered the loss of the bird. These are the areas worst affected by feral dogs and disease spreading maggots and rats,” says Prakash.
And it’s difficult to deal with these animals-gone-wild. “The only way to deal with dogs that have turned feral is to separate the leader from the pack. The dogs need to be further sterilised and castrated and provided a regular food supply. Its only then will they lapse out of feral ways,” says Geeta Seshamani, from dog shelter Friendicoes, which dealt with the Sultanpur problem.
Meanwhile the Parsi community, which has traditionally disposed of its dead by feeding them to vultures, has its own reservations against the new scavengers, which have come up. “The finger from a dead body was found on the window sill of a Parsi home in Mumbai, which deeply affected the family. This is because Kites cannot even remotely do what vultures can. Kites tear away little hunks of flesh and fly away with them, while vultures strip a carcass on the spot,” says a project associate. Though the Parsi community is divided over how to dispose of their dead, with the more modern ones preferring solar concentrators, there are many in the community who believe that the earth can only be purified after the vulture feeds on the dead body.

The last vulture
Three years ago, Wildlife SOS rescued what was perhaps Delhi’s last vulture. Found in a severely dehydrated state and with mild poisoning, the bird was handed over to the Pinjore centre. “We found the bird in Moti Bagh, where there were still some nests. It was unable to take off and it was clear to us that it was in dire need of help,” says Kartick Satyanarayan from Wildlife SOS.
The ultimate aim of these vulture centres is to release fledglings in the wild so the birds can once again forage the way they used to. But this will only be so once the conservationists are sure that Diclofenac no longer reaches the birds. “We are expecting 10-12 more fledglings to be born next year and 20-25 the year after that as many of the birds will attain adulthood. But the release in the wild can only happen once we are sure there is no Diclofenac in the food chain. We will monitor the area for two years before releasing the birds,” says Dr Vibhu Prakash.
We hope this time the takeoff will be right.