Saving Asian vultures

Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction from The RSPB on Vimeo.

BirdLife says on the subject of this video:

Tue, Apr 12, 2011

Three species of south Asia’s vultures are threatened with extinction. The White-rumped Vulture was so abundant in India in the 1980s that it was probably the most common large bird of prey in the world. Only one in a thousand now survives, a 99.9% decline for this species.

All three species – White-rumped, Indian and the Slender-billed Vulture – have declined by more than 97% since the early 1990s.

This shocking decline is because of a veterinary drug, diclofenac, which is toxic to any vulture that feeds on the carcass of recently treated cattle.

April 2011: In some encouraging news for bird enthusiasts, a flock of more than 40 white-rumped vultures has been spotted in the Panidihing Bird Sanctuary in Assam. This is the first sighting in three years of this critically-endangered species in such large numbers, here: here.

05/11/2011 First signs of progress in saving Indian vultures from killer drug: here.

February 2012. Nationwide road surveys in India, initially conducted in 1991-1993 and repeated in 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007, revealed that, by 2007, Asian white-backed vulture (Gyps bengalensis) had fallen to 0.1% of its numbers in the early 1990s, with populations of Indian vulture (Gyps indicus) and Slender-billed vulture (Gyps tenuirostris) having fallen to 3.2% of their earlier level. The last nationwide survey in India was undertaken in 2007.