Bengaluru: Over 500 people across the country, from cities like Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, Dehradun, Jaipur, Ahmedabad and more, have embarked on a massive citizen science project. Starting this weekend, they will be travelling and exploring specific locations close to where they live, looking for one of India’s most vulnerable birds—the vulture.
A mix of working professionals from various fields—ornithologists, naturalists, photographers—and students, between the ages of 18 and 50, have volunteered to be a part of Vulture Count 2024 to count and monitor India’s vultures for the next 30 days. The project, held annually with the aim of helping conserve the vulture populations, is a collaborative effort by World Wide Fund for Nature-India (WWF India) and Bird Count India.
Volunteers will record and log data on the eBird app about vulture sightings after visiting any of the locations on the list shared with them. These specified locations are native habitats for vultures, and include various tiger reserves, wildlife sanctuaries, carcass dumps, landfills, villages and lakes, among others.
Vulture populations in India began declining suddenly and dramatically in the 1990s because of the veterinary drug Diclofenac, which came to be widely used to treat cattle inflammation, but is highly toxic to vultures scavenging and consuming the carcasses. Over 99 percent of vultures were killed in one of the sharpest recorded declines in the population of all species. In the 1980s, the three species of Gyps vultures together numbered over 40 million across South Asia, but the numbers dropped down to less than 20,000 by 2017.
The Vulture Count project will capture data about individual scavenger birds, monitor them and identify their habitats, with the hope of influencing policy on human settlements and environmental effects.
“Since its inception, WWF-India’s Vulture Count has experienced remarkable growth. Starting with just 220 participants in 2021, we’ve expanded significantly over the years. This year alone, we’ve received over 600 registrations for our estimation program, with a notable increase of 200 new volunteers. It’s especially encouraging that around 89 percent of this year’s participants are first-timers,” said Ratul Saha, Director of the raptor conservation programme at WWF.
The month-long project commenced on 7 September, coinciding with International Vulture Day, which is observed on the first Saturday of September every year.
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Counting vultures
Vultures are known to be among the most distinctive looking birds, characterised by their large size and bald heads. They feed on carrion and carcasses as scavengers, and are spread across the globe.
There are 23 species of vultures globally, of which nine are endemic to India. These species—the Indian vulture, bearded vulture, Egyptian vulture, Himalayan griffon, slender-billed vulture, rumpled vulture, red-headed vulture, Eurasian griffon, and cinereous vulture—are the ones that the volunteers of Vulture Count will be observing and counting.
WWF India hosted a virtual orientation session for all the participants on 6 September to train them for identification and logging.
“Data collected from Vulture Count is important for scientific research and conservation efforts. Currently, WWF-India is responsible for assessing the submitted data,” said Saha.
“Additionally, eBird app provides an extra layer of scrutiny with its moderators and stringent guidelines, ensuring accuracy of records. This process involves evaluating total number of vultures recorded, categorising them by species, and mapping their locations.”
While scientific papers might take time, an initial comprehensive report on the programme’s outcomes and final statistics will be released on 13 October.
Elaborating on how citizen participation has helped with wildlife conservation in the past, Mousumi Ghosh, a researcher on Gyps vultures at the Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine, Bengaluru, said, “The involvement of citizens in vulture counts can not only help improve the geographic coverage of monitoring efforts, but also in engendering their support for vulture conservation.”
“Citizen science data, when generated and analysed using robust and well-thought approaches, can be very useful information on trends in vulture numbers over most parts of the country. For instance, Citizen science data from the eBird platform has been useful in looking at trends in vulture numbers over a much larger geographic expanse.”
Vulture population collapse in India
In 1994, the patent on a painkiller commonly used for cattle was lifted. The drug, called Diclofenac, promptly became easily accessible, leading to a huge uptick in its use by Indian farmers. The drug is used effectively in cattle, but is toxic to vultures even in small doses.
Widespread adoption of the drug since the mid-1990s has led to the collapse of vulture populations across the country, with the numbers dropping from over 5 crore to a mere 20,000 or so across India.
New research published in June this year, for which the direct impact of vulture loss on human life was studied, showed that the loss in effective removal of animal carcasses from the environment increased human mortality by four percent in India. The economic losses from vulture collapse is estimated at around $69 billion a year.
India banned the use of Diclofenac in veterinary settings in 2006, although the drug is still in widespread use owing to its accessibility.
“Unfortunately the ban on Diclofenac is still imperfectly observed and closely related variants continue to skirt the law. Unless that medicine stops being used to treat livestock, it is impossible for vultures to recover in the wild because that is an important food source,” said Anant Sudarshan, co-author of the study and senior fellow at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).
Ghosh pointed out that in Nepal, numbers of the three Gyps vultures have already gone up because Diclofenac use fell steeply. But in India, there are no true signs of recovery yet.
Vultures are considered to be among the “keystone” species, whose massive impact on the environment cascades to others. They are effective scavengers, crucial for cleanup of carcasses in the wild and containing the spread of diseases. Because they devour carcasses, they also keep other feral scavenger populations, like those of wild dogs and disease-carrying rats, in check.
The loss of vultures has also been linked to the rapid increase in cases of rabies in India, due to increase in populations of feral animals that spread the disease.
Going forward, WWF-India is also planning to collaborate with State of India’s Birds—a group of 13 government and non-governmental organisations that produce comprehensive reports on Indian birds—for vulture conservation.
“The most important thing is to raise awareness about the costs of letting these drugs enter livestock, and test carcasses across the country to see where it is not being enforced,” said Sudarshan. “I believe it is important that we make the vulture much more of a visible priority of our conservation efforts and make sure more people understand why they matter.”
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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