Hope for Animals and Their World

by Jane Goodall; Thane Maynard; Gail Hudson

  The recovery plan for these birds calls for the establishment of three geographically separate viable populations—a total of about five thousand individual birds. To reach this goal, the USFWS first developed an active public outreach and education program to garner support for the birds; second, it is continuing active research; and third, it’s cooperating with government agencies and private landowners to manage prairie chicken habitat. A captive breeding program with the goal of reintroducing the prairie chickens into the wild was started in the early 1990s.

  The first chicks were hatched at Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, Texas, in 1992; other organizations, such as Texas A&M University and several zoos, are taking part. Once captive-raised chicks become capable of independent survival, they are sent to a planned release site where their health is checked and they are fitted with radio transmitters. For two weeks, they are cared for in acclimation pens; then they are released into their natural environment. It seems that they are genetically programmed to adapt almost immediately to life in the tallgrass prairie. In other words, once free, they behave to the manor born.

  Locals Offering Safe Harbor

  In 2007, a new safe harbor agreement between the Coastal Prairie Coalition of the Grazing Lands Conservation Initiative and the USFWS was finalized to help private landowners to be part of the conservation effort to restore and maintain coastal prairie habitat. In August, thirty captive-bred juveniles from various facilities were released onto private ranchland in Goliad County, Texas, a stretch of prairie that has been kept intact by the same family since the mid-1800s. It was a milestone event, the first-ever release onto private land, and other chicks will be released there throughout 2008 and 2009. It is hoped that many more landowners will participate. Other captive-bred birds have been released on Texas Nature Conservancy property near Texas City and the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge near Eagle Lake, Texas, where Terry Rossignol is refuge manager.

  Throughout 2007, staff at the refuge worked hard to increase numbers of chicks hatched in the wild. Out of a total of eighteen nests (two of which were destroyed, but remade), twelve were successful, and seventy-seven chicks made it to two weeks of age. During these first weeks, they are very vulnerable—to predation, flooding, and starvation. It is, therefore, desperately necessary to keep as many as possible alive during this time. It was decided to ask for help from volunteers. Forty-three individuals stepped forward—Fish and Wildlife employees from across the region, a school group, a master naturalist group, and various others. Their job was to assist in collecting insects for the chicks and their mothers.

  Each volunteer, armed with a large canvas net and some plastic bags, was sent out into the tallgrass on the refuge. The task was to sweep the net quickly back and forth through the grasses to capture as many insects of as many species as possible. These had to be transferred for safekeeping into gallon-size bags. Every day, collections were made from nine or ten in the morning until about four in the afternoon. One mother and her ten to twelve chicks can eat about twelve bags of insects per day for the first few weeks of the chicks’ lives. That is about one hundred insects each per day!

  One Chick, One Victory at a Time

  When I talked with Terry on the phone, he told me that, after all that hard work, only eighteen chicks survived. In fact, he said, they had thought the number was even lower, but then, in September, “four unbanded, un-radio-collared birds were seen.” Obviously they, too, were survivors of the breeding season. It still seems a low survival rate—but it is eighteen more birds to boost the breeding colony.

  I asked him what keeps him going, how he gets over the disappointments and setbacks they face in this quest to save the Attwater’s prairie chicken. “Some days are more difficult than others,” he said. And at those low moments, he thinks back on the “little victories” that they have experienced and so is able to regain his positive attitude. He praised the many volunteers who work so hard on behalf of this colorful and comical prairie grouse. “There is hope,” he said, “so long as people are willing to help.”

  In Terry, the Attwater’s prairie chicken has a powerful advocate. He has been directly involved with the birds since February 1993 and has no intention of giving up. His reasons for persisting? “I have always been drawn to the underdog,” Terry told me, “and I like challenges. The Attwater’s offers me both. And deep down, I want the Attwater’s to still be around so my grandkids can enjoy them as much as I do.”

  Satiated vultures rest after feeding at the edge of Nepal’s “Vulture Restaurant”—a place where vultures are given safe food, free of diclofenac. (Manoj Gautan)

  Asian Vultures

  Oriental White-Backed Vulture (Gyps bengalensis)

  Long-Billed Vulture (G. indicus)

  Slender-Billed Vulture (G. tenuirostris)

  I have great respect for vultures. They fascinate me. I have not watched them in Asia, but I spent hours observing them on the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Their powerful flight is beautiful, their eyesight phenomenal, and their social behavior complex. The bare skin on the neck and head, which some people find repellent, is absolutely necessary—imagine getting blood and entrails clogging your feathers! And in some species, that bare skin acts as an indicator of mood. When an individual gets angry during competition at a carcass, or mating is involved, the neck may become bright pink! They are amazingly patient birds, too. Sometimes, having flown in from far away, they must watch while the bigger predators eat their fill—lions and then hyenas. Finally it is the turn of the vultures, which compete—often successfully—with the jackals.

  Disaster Strikes in India

  During the mid-1990s, Dr. Vibhu Prakash of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) was one of the heroes who first alerted the scientific community to the fact that vultures in India were dying—mysteriously and in large numbers. Indeed, by the late 1990s, the three Gyps species—the long-billed or Indian vulture, the Oriental white-rumped or white-backed vulture, and the slender-billed vulture—were all listed as critically endangered. It was estimated that their populations had fallen by more than 97 percent in less than a decade—“one of the steepest declines experienced by any bird species,” said Dr. Debbie Pain of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). They were being found, dead and dying, in Nepal, in Pakistan, and throughout India. In some places, they had disappeared altogether.

  Learning of the disaster, the Peregrine Fund sent scientists to monitor breeding populations of Oriental white-rumped vultures in Pakistan’s Punjab Province. In 2000, they found twenty-four hundred occupied nests in thirteen breeding colonies. Returning to the same sites each breeding season, they recorded decreasing numbers occupying nest sites each year—and they were collecting dead vultures daily. By 2006, there were only twenty-seven breeding pairs. The report concluded: “This study has documented possibly the most disastrous population crash of any raptor species.”

  In 2007, when I was in India, I met Mike Pandey, a successful wildlife filmmaker and conservationist, and we talked about the vulture situation. He told me that when he first realized how endangered the Asian vultures had become, he decided to visit the carcass dump in Rajasthan where he had filmed vultures years before. Back then, he said, he had been literally engulfed by thousands of vultures, squabbling over the carcasses, cleaning the environment. But when he returned it was very different.

  “I walked over the carcasses of thousands of vultures,” he said. “I walked on the broken wings of the powerful birds.” He was shocked. A pack of feral dogs that was feeding and breeding in the carcass grounds attacked him, but he managed to jump up onto the roof of his jeep, escaping with only a few scratches.

  The Important Role of Scavengers

  At one time, Mike told me, the Indian subcontinent had the highest density of vultures anywhere—close to eighty-seven million, he reckoned. At the same time, there were some nine hundred million cattle in India, the highest number in the world. Vultures used to clean up the carcass
es of those that died in cities, villages, and the countryside—an estimated ten million a year. With fewer vultures, millions of cattle carcasses—and those of wild animals, too—now lie putrefying, creating a major health hazard for humans as well as livestock. The feral dogs and rats who took over the job of scavenging took much longer to strip a carcass.

  Mike later sent me an e-mail noting that outbreaks of anthrax have recently been reported in four places across India. “Hot summer thermal currents could easily carry anthrax spores or pathogens from the decomposing carcasses into the stratosphere and carry it around the world,” he wrote. Mike is genuinely fearful of what could happen if we lose the Asian vultures. “Our unthinking actions have knocked the master decomposer out of the skies,” he told me. Without the vultures, “the putrefying carcasses are spawning grounds for hundreds of lethal mutating pathogens more dangerous than the bird flu or anything known to man.”

  Six months after my visit to India, I met with Jemima Parry-Jones, director of the International Centre for Birds of Prey in the UK. She commented that at the height of the vulture’s decline in 1997, the World Health Organization estimated that thirty thousand people died of rabies in India—more than in any other country. And that, she said, could be attributable to the huge increase in rats and dogs, both rabies carriers. “It just goes to show that we have no idea how human-caused species declines will later impact humans.”

  One other service that vultures have traditionally performed in Asia involves their role in the funeral rites of some communities, including the Parsee of India. Jemima described an extraordinary meeting she had with a group of Parsees, including a high priest, in a rather noisy café in the UK. The Parsees explained how the decline in the vulture population posed a very real problem for their communities, as the vultures were relied upon to devour the bodies of their dead that, traditionally, are laid out in a circular raised structure known as the Tower of Silence. Gradually the chatter from the surrounding tables died away into a somewhat startled silence!

  Why Were They Dying?

  No wonder so many people were concerned about the possible extinction of the vultures in Asia—quite apart from their intrinsic value as a marvelously designed avian species. Initially it was thought that some disease was responsible, but postmortem examinations of dead birds failed to reveal any viral or bacterial infection. Affected vultures hunched their backs, their heads and necks drooped, and it was found that their internal organs were much inflamed, their livers covered with whitish crystals. It was assumed that the crystals were uric acid, and that the condition was similar to gout in humans. But what was causing it?

  In May 2003, at a meeting of raptor biologists, a scientist working with the Peregrine Fund presented information that seemed to confirm a growing suspicion that the vulture deaths were linked to the anti-inflammatory painkilling drug diclofenac. Vultures that had died of gout had high levels of diclofenac in their kidneys. This medication, for veterinary use, had not been introduced to the Indian subcontinent until the early 1990s, but it had rapidly become very popular because it was cheap—less than a dollar for a course of treatment.

  In January 2004, the results of a joint study conducted by the Peregrine Fund and the Ornithological Society of Pakistan confirmed that diclofenac was indeed the primary reason for vulture deaths. That was an important study that eventually resulted in a ban on the manufacturing of veterinary diclofenac by the Drug Controller General of India. This ban was soon introduced also in both Nepal and Pakistan.

  Unfortunately, this is not enough: Not only are there major problems with enforcing the ban, but it is still legal to import, sell, and use diclofenac. Moreover, the diclofenac legally manufactured for human use has started to infiltrate the veterinary market. Until diclofenac has been completely removed from the environment in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, there is no safe future for the Asian vultures.

  Nevertheless, the fact that the Indian government banned the manufacture of the drug, in such a relatively short time, was a historic triumph. In part, this can be attributed to the release, in March 2006, of a film made by Mike Pandey. Called Broken Wings, it resulted from his shocking visit to the carcass dumps. It is a powerful documentary that explains not only the reason for the vulture deaths but also the major role that these birds play in maintaining the health of the ecosystems of South Asia. It was shown, translated into five languages, on all the national TV channels. The radio carried the story as well.

  At the same time there was personal outreach to the local people since, in the long term, they have the most influence over the vultures’ fate. Mike told me that the Earth Matters Foundation created life-size vulture puppets and took them on road shows to rural communities, so that farmers and locals could see the magnificence of the birds and become sensitized to their plight. In parallel, the Peregrine Fund, the RSPB, and the BNHS produced and distributed more than ten thousand educational leaflets and flyers in Urdu and Hindi in villages closest to the remaining vulture colonies in Pakistan and India.

  A Vulture Restaurant

  Another initiative of the Peregrine Fund was to establish, in 2003, a “Vulture Restaurant” near a breeding site in Pakistan, where uncontaminated food was set out for the vultures. But although this reduced mortality in the peak breeding season, it made no difference once the young had fledged, and so it was closed. However, a similar vulture feeding station is still operated in Nepal by a dedicated group of Roots & Shoots members under the leadership of Manoj Gautam. The group is made up of local youth from Nawalparasi, a town about 150 miles west of Kathmandu. They gather animal carcasses (usually cows and buffalo) that are free of diclofenac and take them to their Vulture Restaurant to provide a supply of safe food for the birds. The work is hard—transporting the carcasses takes a lot of time, energy, and money.

  Roots & Shoots is also working to raise awareness of the problem in local communities. As a result, Manoj told me, the people have become interested in helping to save the vultures. On one occasion in 2007, for example, some local youths reported to the Roots & Shoots group that they had found vultures eating an unidentified carcass. Manoj and his team immediately went to the spot and saw that more than half of the carcass was already eaten. Fearing that it might be diclofenac-infected, they buried what was left of it. Two days later they got the news that some vultures were sick and seemed to be dying. Again, the Roots & Shoots team rushed to the scene.

  “We saw three vultures that were agonizing and flapping their wings on the ground and could not fly,” Manoj said. One bird managed to fly away, but its wing beats were weak. The other two died. Diclofenac poisoning was confirmed when Manoj dissected the birds and found the telltale signs—uric acid in the liver and kidneys.

  “With heavy hearts, seven of us buried the vultures in two pits dug by Roots & Shoots members in a nearby riverbank,” Manoj told me. Fortunately, though, those deaths did not diminish, but rather strengthened, their determination. “We made a joint commitment,” Manoj said, “that we will not let such destruction happen again.” One major problem is that diclofenac is often smuggled across the border from India. And so, Manoj told me, the R&S members even patrol the local veterinary shops for diclofenac, doing their best to make sure no one is selling the drug.

  The Threat of the Kite Festival

  There is one other significant threat to the vultures—a very unexpected one. Once a year, throughout Asia, a series of incredibly popular kite festivals are held—a custom brought vividly to the Western world in Khaled Hosseini’s powerful best seller, now a film, The Kite Runner. These festivals are held in late winter to celebrate the harvest season. Kite-flying competitions are an old custom, but in recent times the traditional cotton thread has been replaced by strings coated with sharp powdered glass. Tens of thousands of kites darken the sky every day during the festival season. The kites compete, each trying to dislodge the other from the sky using the razor-sharp string to slice off opponents’ kites … all in good fun.

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nbsp; Unfortunately, though, thousands of birds are hit and injured by the new kite strings, including many vultures. Mike Pandey told me the string called “Maajah” is the most dangerous—it sometimes shears off a bird’s wing completely. He said that in just one day during the 2008 kite festival, more than eight thousand injured birds, including four badly injured vultures, were brought in by the local NGOs and volunteer groups in the city of Ahmedabad alone.

  Even more tragic, Mike told me that these events take place at the very peak of the breeding season. “There is an urgent need to revert to the old cotton thread and also to ensure that no strings are left entangled in trees and bushes,” he said. Fortunately, there is a ray of hope in this situation. Earth Matters Foundation, along with other concerned individuals and organizations, is fighting to get the glass-coated string banned all over the country. Also, Mike made a news feature about the vultures that was telecast on India’s national network in spring 2008, appealing to people to stop using the Maajah string.

  Captive Breeding: Is It the Solution?

  During an international vulture conference in India in early 2004, a resolution was taken to start captive breeding programs for all three Asian species in order to save them from extinction. This was later ratified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

  When I met Jemima, she told me that “in India we now have three facilities, one—the oldest—at Pinjore, outside Kalka in Haryana State; one in West Bengal; and one in Assam. The one in Assam will concentrate mainly on the slender-billed vulture as that is its natural range and it is the rarest of the three critically endangered species.”