20 Nov 2017
Watch as conservation history is
made: six captive-reared Critically Endangered White-rumped Vultures venture
out into the wild. This comes at a time when the world is finally waking up to
the plight of vultures.
By Jessica Law
The moment has finally arrived.
Bait is placed outside the entrance of the pre-release aviary, and the door is
opened from a remote hide. As wild vultures descended to feed, five out of our
six yellow-tagged protagonists are lured outside to join in in the scrum. Soon
they are squabbling and interacting with them as if they’d always been part of
the gang. And, in a way, they had – in the weeks before their release, they had
been socialising with wild vultures through the wire while exercising their wings.
It’s been a fantastic couple of
months for vultures. In October, the ambitious Multi-species Action Plan to
save 15 vulture species over 128 countries was endorsed with enthusiasm at the Convention on
Migratory Species Conference of Parties in Manila. At almost exactly the same
time in India, the Madras high Court ruled to uphold the dosage restriction on
vulture-killing drug diclofenac. And last week, in Nepal, six captive-reared
White-rumped Vultures were finally released into a wild that, for the first
time in decades, could be truly vulture-safe.
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