BNHS vulture expert bags conservation award

MUMBAI: Saving vultures is his vocation. And as vocations go, it’s a tough one. India’s vulture population has crashed by 95 per cent since the mid-1980s,when the country had tens of thousands of these birds.
The number is still falling, for mysterious reasons. But Vibhu Prakash, a senior scientist with the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), is working so heroically to crack the mystery that he has just won the Marsh Award for Bird Conservation from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK.
The award, given to a conservationist working on a globally threatened species, is a tribute to the BNHS’ painstaking efforts to collect vital information on the biodiversity of the Indian subcontinent and alerting the world to the consequences of losing even a single species.
Dr Prakash heads the new Vulture Care Centre in Pinjore in Haryana. He is collaborating with a team of British and Indian scientists, including veterinary pathologist Andrew Cunningham of the Royal Zoological Society and virologist G R Ghalsasi of the Poultry Diagnostic and Research Centre at Venkateshwara Hatcheries in Pune, to identify the virus that’s killing the birds.
In April 2001, the team jointly bagged the Darwin Initiative for Survival of Species grant for three years. Within this project, colonies of vultures are being monitored and nation-wide surveys carried out annually.
"We are conducting intensive investigations to pinpoint the pathogen that’s killing our vultures, but, as you know, it’s proving a very tricky business," Dr Prakash said. "We hope to be able to make a breakthrough soon. Then we will produce a recovery plan."
In the meantime, his team is gathering sick vultures from around the country’s 30 vulture zones and tending to them at the Pinjore centre. "We give them food and water and ensure that they do not exert themselves," he explained.
"While they are in captivity, a number of the vultures survive. But once they are out in the wild, they mostly die." They have found that many of the birds show signs of visceral gout and eventually die of dehydration. They have also found that the chicks of the sick vultures are healthy to start with, but turn sick due to contact with their parents.
In view of this problem, Dr Prakash said that they are planning to start a captive breeding centre where birds will not be used but only eggs that will be collected from the wild and incubated artificially. Bird lovers are praying that such breeding centres will spell a ray of hope for the vultures of India.
The statistics are chilling. In Bharatpur, there were 350 pairs of vultures in a 29-square-km area in 1988, but today there are none. In Bandavgarh, in MP, there were 1,000 pairs in 1980; today there are about 40. What’s more, the disease has spread from India to Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.
The three species that once were most common—the white-backed vulture, the long-billed vulture and the cylinder-bill vulture—have all but vanished into the clouds of history. The vulture decline is now recognised as being not only one of India’s but also the world’s greatest conservation problems.
"There is a real potential of the disease spreading to related species of vultures in the Middle East, Africa and Europe," said Dr Prakash. To prevent this, the team has mounted a campaign to monitor the health and movements of Himalayan and Eurasian griffons, migratory vultures from Central Asia that winter in India.
Three such vultures have just been fitted with satellite transmitters and three more will get them soon. "Keep your fingers crossed that no harm comes to these vultures," declared Dr Prakash. "If it does, it’s goodbye to the vultures of the world."