Two days after Nepal released its last captive vultures, I was in Dubai airport when I received a WhatsApp message from the conservationists. At least ten vultures had been found dead not far from the release site, and others were sick. None of the recent releases were among the dead, but one was a captive that had been tagged and released in 2019. Another tagged bird, which was wild, was found dead in the area a few days later.
A toxicology report came back as inconclusive, but D.B. suspected that a vicious cycle was to blame. In 2021, about fifty kilometres west of Jatayu Restaurant, some village kids went into a field to play and discovered dozens of dead and dying vultures. Nepali scientists found that villagers had poisoned some canines, and when they died vultures had eaten them. Sixty-nine vultures died in that one event. It’s a domino effect that scientists have seen elsewhere: the more birds die, the more predators encroach on villagers, and the more villagers try to poison them—killing even more vultures. If vultures symbolize how connected we are, they also symbolize how easily the fabric of an ecosystem can unravel.
Worldwide, the threats to vultures are varied and growing. Two million years ago, vultures led protohumans to food on the East African savannah, according to Bildstein. In parts of modern Africa, humans have transformed vulture territory into farmland, and poachers kill the birds so they don’t draw the attention of law enforcement. In North America, hunters leave behind game that is riddled with lead shot, which slowly poisons vultures such as the California condor. Vultures are electrocuted by power lines, hit by wind-turbine blades, stranded without habitats as their nesting trees burn or are cut down, and persecuted by people. Of the world’s twenty-three species of vultures, nearly three quarters are in decline, according to the I.U.C.N.
I went to Nepal because the country shows what is possible. With the support of the government, B.C.N. offered veterinarians and pharmacies a vulture-safe drug, meloxicam, in exchange for the toxic one. In the spring of 2010, not far from the vulture restaurant, conservationists symbolically burned a chemically stabilized stockpile of diclofenac. Annual survival rates for white-rumped vultures have climbed from a low of around fifty per cent to more than ninety per cent. Surveys and testing show that the area is diclofenac-free. SAVE certified the area around the restaurant as the Gandaki-Lumbini Vulture Safe Zone. Like the vulture restaurant, the safe zone was the first of its kind in the world.
India, just ten miles away, is another story. By 2020, more than seven hundred vultures were in India’s eight breeding centers, but few have been released because India’s “safe zones” remain provisional. When I asked the scientists what made India so different, I was told it is a vast, complex country whose central and local governments often disagree. It’s difficult to secure permits and permission for conservation work. Pharmacy surveys and carcass testing show that it’s still too easy to acquire diclofenac.
India’s wild-vulture population has only recently stabilized. In July, the Indian government banned the veterinary use of ketoprofen and aceclofenac, two drugs that have also proved deadly to vultures. Legal efforts to ban other harmful drugs, including nimesulide, have recently stalled. Abhishek Ghoshal, an Indian conservation scientist who worked for almost two years at the Bombay Natural History Society, seemed guarded in his hopes. “One needs to be very patient,” he told me. “The biggest hope is that we still have vultures in the skies.”
Soon after Nepal’s captive-breeding program began, a conservationist scooped a wild white-rumped vulture chick from its nest. The bird spent about a decade in an aviary, where she learned to fly in short spurts. At some point, she was tagged and dubbed C5. Finally, in 2019, she was set free.
During my visit to Nawalpur, I leaned over Joshi’s shoulder as he sat in a flimsy plastic chair, opened his laptop, and showed me a daily ritual: tracking the locations of more than a hundred of B.C.N.’s tagged birds. For the first few years of the release program, none of the captive birds moved far from the restaurant. In her first winter in the wild, C5 also stayed nearby, accepting the food that Nepali, sometimes with the help of his family, brought her. But, one spring day, the researchers consulted their map and saw her flying west. She flew more than a hundred kilometres, across the Indian border; at one point, she was nearly shot by an Indian military officer who was suspicious of her tracker antenna and wing tag. Later, she was found on the ground in Uttar Pradesh, seemingly too exhausted to fly any farther. The Bombay Natural History Society, along with state forestry officials, nursed her back to health and released her.
From a vulture’s vantage, there are no dividing lines between safe zones and danger zones. C5 zigzagged back and forth between India and Nepal until, one day in 2022, the B.C.N. team saw that her tracker had stopped moving. She was still warm, but scientists wondered whether she was weak, or poisoned. They needed to get to her quickly, to do what is known as ground-truthing. Deelip Chand Thakuri, the field biologist who was closest, went to investigate.
Thakuri told me that, when he arrived at C5’s location, he scoured the trees and forest floor, searching for the spot where the signal came from. Telling me the story, he paused and then smiled. “When I reached there, I saw that it was in the nest,” he said. C5 had stopped moving because she had paired with a wild vulture. That year, C5 successfully raised a chick. The next year, she did the same. It turned out that other nests were also nearby. C5 had led researchers to an entire vulture colony that they hadn’t known about. There, in the trees, were a dozen pairs of healthy vultures, busy making more of their kind. ♦
This article was supported in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society. Tulsi Rauniyar contributed reporting.