Unlovely and unloved, vultures play a vital role as nature’s clean-up squad but are now one of the most threatened groups of birds on the planet.
It’s hard to love vultures. Their bare-headed appearance, scavenging habits and reputation as the refuse disposal workers of the bird world rarely endear them to a public who prefer more conventionally attractive creatures. But amid growing fears that the birds are facing extinction, conservationists are calling for more to be done to save these unloved birds of prey.
If this seems like old news, that’s because for some species it is. In the early 1990s, observers in India began to notice that vultures, which usually gathered in huge flocks around animal carcasses, were declining at an unprecedented rate.
At first, conservationists found this hard to believe: vultures are among the most adaptable of all the world’s birds and have learned to live alongside human beings, serving as the clean-up squads in urban and rural areas alike.
But in just 15 years, from 1992 to 2007, India’s most common three vulture species declined by between 97% and 99.9%. Read more…
