Today is International Vulture Awareness Day (IVAD), and - as I mentioned in an Aside yesterday - we along with raptor conservation and research organisations around the world will be promoting vultures, bloggers everywhere will be blogging about vultures, ‘vulture restaurants’ are throwing open their doors to both visiting vultures and visiting vulture-watchers, and birders around the world will be scanning the skies for vulture kettles.

On the face of it, all this attention for a group of scavenging birds that are fairly universally seen as ugly, quarrelsome, and unkempt, dark reminders of mortality, and definitely not the sort of guests you’d invite to a dinner-party (”We sent the invitations out Mrs Vulture, I know we did - it must just be coincidence that both you and the Hyenas didn’t receive them…”) must seem a little odd (especially to any non-birder who stumbles across IVAD and who had probably assumed that we birders usually celebrate delicacy, beauty or song rather than excrement-coated bags of feathers who spend much of their day with their heads shoved up a rotting corpse).

However there is a very good reason for IVAD. Whilst New World vultures on the whole seem to be pretty much holding their own (with the obvious exception of the magnificent California Condor which was taken to the brink of extinction by cattle ranchers and land speculators), those in the Old World are in dire trouble. They need, in fact, all the attention they can get!

I actually know first-hand how significantly vultures have disappeared from vast tracts of land. When I first visited India, in 1985, one of the birding highlights was seeing hundreds of vultures rising up over Delhi as the air warmed up. I haven’t seen a single vulture anywhere in India - and I’ve been many times - in the last few years. Across the Indian subcontinent populations of three once-common vulture species - the Indian Gyps indicus, Slender-billed G. tenuirostris, and the White-rumped G. bengalensis - have declined by more than 97% (some estimates put it nearer 99%) as a result of scavenging on cattle carcasses contaminated with the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac. The drug causes visceral gout in vultures and extremely painful deaths: all three species are now listed as Critically Endangered - ie all three are in danger of extinction within the next ten years. A fourth species on the subcontinent, the Red-headed Vulture Sarcogyps calvus, suffered an estimated 94% decline in the 20th Century - probably because of the loss of the large, wild ungulates it used to scavenge on as the human population exploded. It too is now also listed as Critically Endangered.

On my first visits to East Africa (to Nairobi, Kenya mainly) vultures were a common sight flying over national parks and even scavenging at roadside kills. Not any more they’re not. There have been mass vulture deaths in East Africa, again associated with the misuse of chemicals. This time the culprit is Furadan, a horribly toxic carbamate pesticide used to control insects and, in Kenya, to kill lions and other livestock predators by baiting carcasses. Many scavengers, particularly vultures but also eagles and small and medium-sized mammals as well as ’staggering’ numbers of lions, have been killed. It’s been marketed as a solution to all sorts of pest control, but Furadan already has a chequered history. It has killed millions of birds in the US as well: in its granular form, a single grain will kill a bird and a quarter teaspoon (1 mL) can be fatal to humans. Thankfully the US manufacturers, the FMC Corporation, has now halted Furadan sales to Kenya and has begun a buy-back programme to rid the country of its old stocks (not because of vulture deaths, incidentally, but because of the potential backlash from the multi-million dollar wildlife-tourism industry).

Huge population declines in West Africa appear to be due mainly to massive habitat loss and the consequent disappearance of wild ungulates that vultures traditionally fed on: the commonest of Africa’s vultures, the White-backed G. africanus has declined by a massive 90% and is now listed as Near-threatened.

In other parts of Africa the emergence of Diclofenac, which is now being aggressively marketed throughout the continent, is causing extreme concern amongst conservationists. The disappearance of vultures from large areas of their ranges in South Africa - the Cape Vulture G. coprotheres declined by 60-70% in eastern South Africa between 1992 and 2007 - is apparently partly because of their continued use in traditional medicine and sorcery: humans may fear or loathe vultures but we’re still happy to ingest their body parts for their perceived medicinal and psychological benefits! Other threats to vultures in Africa (as elsewhere) include power line collisions and electrocutions, disturbance at breeding sites, drowning in farm reservoirs, and direct persecution.

Fortunately it’s not all doom and gloom. There have been successful re-introductions of vultures into old parts of their range where habitat still exists and education and awareness-raising has reduced hunting somewhat (eg the Eurasian Griffon Vulture G. fulvus, which while still threatened in parts of its much-reduced range is increasing in others), funded breeding programmes in India and Nepal are starting to show results, thankfully, which , might yet stop the total extinction of the region’s vultures, and bans on Diclofenac and toxins like Furadan are becoming widespread as their effects become more widely understood. And of course, there are world-wide movements like International Vulture Awareness Day which are trying to ‘clean up’ the image of this most unfairly maligned group of birds and make us all aware of just how seriously threatened they are.

We’ve come remarkably close to wiping the skies clean of vultures across huge areas of the globe, but with effort and care we may just yet get these magnificent - and entirely harmless - birds back where they undoubtedly belong, up near the sun, soaring on the slightest of updraughts, patrolling whole horizons as they did long before a far more dangerous species came and plucked them out of the air…