The Earth Story

On the Vulture, Part IV: The Vulture under threat

Check out Parts I, II, and III: The Vulture in human culture (http://on.fb.me/1OtuBPq) The Vulture is more than what it eats (http://on.fb.me/1Qq0rzb) The Vulture as nature’s caretaker (http://on.fb.me/20yeKVh)

In my previous posts, some commenters mentioned the precipitous decline of vulture populations across the Himalayan region. The numbers are indeed sobering — in 2006, 99% of the Old World vultures in India, Pakistan, and Nepal were wiped out after consuming livestock carcasses that contained the drug diclofenac. The drug is prevalently used as a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory way to fend off various diseases in cattle. Unbeknownst to cattle farmers, diclofenac remains an active substance in dead livestock, and any vulture that fed on a drugged-up carcass suffered acute kidney failure and a very swift death.

The Old World vultures remain a threatened species, even though diclofenac has been banned in India since its catastrophic consequences in 2006. But enforcement across India’s billion-fold population is difficult, and diclofenac remains a cheap and widely-used ward against disease among cattle farmers. Diclofenac remains a legal drug by livestock farmers in Africa and Europe, but is not the only peril faced by the Old World vultures; in some parts of Africa, witch doctors believe that vultures’ brains and eyes possess mystical abilities, and are heavily hunted as a result. In Mumbai, where kettles of vultures once populated the skies, a Zoroastrian sect known as the Parsi has taken to constructing vulture aviaries to preserve their sky burial customs.

With governments and members of the general public being further acquainted to the ecological importance of vultures, various conservation programs are taking hold across the world. In Africa, there are outreach programs that educate local communities on environmental dangers of pesticides. In wildlife sanctuaries across North and South America, turkey vultures are used as trackers for regional environmental change, and members of the public are able to track their movements through online GPS programs.

With their bloody reputation, vultures haven’t always been treated with the same ardor as some of their fellow carnivores. Tigers, lions, and eagles have been heavily romanticized in literature and across cultures, while cuddly polar bears won’t hesitate to kill a human if they need to eat. The very mention of vultures, on the other hand, usually prompts a nauseous reaction, and even its name is colloquially used as an insult toward the scrounging bums of society. But thanks to the growing spread of information and education, vultures are not only being recognized for their role in nature, but also their possible extinction. Perhaps the Tibetan Buddhists were on to something with their spiritual reverence of these corpse-devouring, bacteria-killing, bald-headed birds.

-Darren

Photo credit: http://bit.ly/1P2yXuS

More reading: http://bit.ly/1SgCImO http://bit.ly/1o3gxlH http://bit.ly/1lwI3CN http://nyti.ms/1KfPbnP http://bit.ly/1uDEiQ1 http://bit.ly/1IEVmi4 http://bit.ly/1SOCuTv

On the Vulture, Part I: The Vulture and human culture

In April 2013, while on a hike in the Pyrenees of France, a woman lost her footing on the side of a cliff and fell more than 980 feet to her death. Her friends immediately alerted park authorities, and within an hour, her mangled body was found hidden under the side of the cliff. But what they discovered shocked them — only a fleshless corpse remained, with bits of frayed clothing and shoes hanging off her bare bones. Medical examiners later determined that the griffon vultures of the Pyrenees were the reason behind her fleshless body, meaning her entire body had to have been devoured by the scavenging birds in less than an hour.

We all know the classic film trope of circling vultures in films — the valiant hero, wandering despairingly through a barren desert, looks up to an unforgiving sky and spots a wake of vultures, circling malevolently as they balefully observe their next potential meal. Modern Western cultures have framed vultures alongside their obsession with death — grimly unforgiving, ravaging, and opportunistic. But in many other cultures, vultures are considered creatures of a more benevolent nature. In ancient Egypt, the goddess of death and rebirth was Nekhbet, who was often portrayed as a vulture-headed woman. The ancient Egyptians, remarkably prescient for their time, recognized the ecological importance of vultures in the food chain and ecosystem. Native American totems often depict vultures as spirit animals that represent the acceptance of hardships and vindication of the spirit.

Today, Western cultures often associate vultures with sky burials, which are mainly practiced by Buddhist and Zoroastrian communities in Tibet and South Asia. In the remote Himalayan plateaus, Tibetan Buddhists revere the vulture as a sky spirit, whose act of feeding on corpses is regarded as an important rite for the deceased. The bodies of the departed are usually dismembered by a burial master in an elaborate ritual, who then feeds their rendered remains to a wake of vultures. Tibetan Buddhism teaches that the human body is nothing more than vessel of the soul. At the time of death, the soul dispenses of its body like a shell before it moves on to the afterlife. Sky burials illustrate the connection between the human body and the natural world — feeding a human body to a wake of vultures swiftly returns its nutrients to the environment, conferring the soul’s vessel back to the cycle of life. In the isolated Himalayan peaks, where carrion-hungry fowl are more commonplace than tractable soil or firewood, sky burials remain the most practical means of honoring the dead.

-Darren

Photo credit: http://bit.ly/1P1HmUG

More reading: http://bit.ly/1nnlotz http://huff.to/1OhkAok http://bit.ly/1N6rUiA http://bit.ly/1RkYbdu http://nyti.ms/1SNK6oj http://bit.ly/1eoER7b