Twenty critically endangered vultures—10 long-billed, the rest white-rumped—bred in captivity at a conservation facility in Haryana are set to be released into the wild at two tiger reserves in Maharashtra, the website News18.com reported.
“This is the first such release of captive-bred, critically endangered vultures in Maharashtra,” the report quoted Kishor Rithe, director, Bombay Natural History Society, as saying. “We brought 20 birds from the Vulture Conservation Breeding and Research Centre at Pinjore, Haryana, early this year and kept them at the Pench Tiger Reserve and Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve. All have now been tagged and are ready to take flight.”
The global positioning system telemetry tags fitted on the endangered vultures will enable researchers to track and monitor the birds for at least a year. The magnificent birds were hatched artificially at Haryana’s Bir Shikargaha Wildlife Sanctuary in Pinjore, which houses India’s oldest vulture conservation breeding and research centre since 2001.
“The birds are 4-5 years old and mature enough for release,” the report quoted Dr Prabhunath Shukla, field director at the Pench Tiger Reserve, as saying. “As part of the soft-release process, we kept them in pre-release aviaries to acclimatize them to local conditions and enable them to interact with wild vultures before they are freed into their habitat.”
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The long-billed vultures, also known as Indian vultures (scientific name Gyps indicus), were released in the aviary in the East Pench range, which has been a home for vultures for many years, while a new Jatayu Conservation Project was set up at the Tadoba Andhari reserve by the Maharashtra Forest Department to re-establish the white-rumped vultures (scientific name Gyps bengalensis) in the region, said officials.
Vultures were pushed to the brink of extinction by the widespread use of the veterinary painkiller diclofenac in the treatment of livestock. The drug is fatal for the birds that feed on carcasses of cattle that were administered diclofenac shortly before death.
As the use of diclofenac and similar formulations rose in the 1990s, the numbers of vultures in India plummeted almost 99%, from several million to a few thousands. The use of diclofenac by veterinarians was so rampant that vultures, which were once common near human settlements, began to disappear. Researchers only found out why in 2003: the drug was causing kidney failure in the birds.
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According to BirdLife International, a global partnership of environmental non-governmental organizations and national conservation organizations, the population decline of Asia’s vultures was among the fastest ever recorded in a bird. Worryingly, a similar trend is now seen in Africa’s vultures. In 2015, BirdLife announced that Africa’s vultures are on a steep slide towards extinction.
In all, six of the continent’s 11 vulture species were placed in a higher extinction risk category, with numbers plummeting 97%. As a result, as many as 11 of the 15 living Old World vulture species and three of the seven New World species are today classified as ‘critically endangered’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.
In India, the government banned the use of diclofenac for veterinary treatment and strengthened vulture conservation measures in 2006. The country now has four vulture breeding centres, in Haryana, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal.
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So far, a grand total of 30 captive-bred vultures has been released into the wild, according to the News18.com report. Ahead of the latest release, BNHS teams have been conducting pharmacy surveys, sampling carcasses, educating cattle owners, and sensitising villagers about vulture nesting colonies and vulture food to keep the keep birds safe at least within a 100 km periphery of each release site, even beyond the reserve forests, the report added.
