Eat in, or take away

It was about nine in the morning and the hide was getting hot.?I was stooped over in the world’s worst hide, up a tree in northern Cambodia looking at several vultures who were looking at a dead cow.

We had put the cow there yesterday to form what we call a ‘vulture restaurant’. Not, I hasten to add, a place where people eat vultures but where we give starving vultures a bite to eat.?In the 1950's the travel writer Norman Lewis talked about his plane having to dodge vultures on the flight from Phnom Penh to Lao.?Until the mid 1990's these same species were a regular feature of any Indian city.?Hundreds of thousands soared the skies of India looking for dead cows.?Members of the Parsis group depended on Mumbai’s vultures to dispose of their dead at the wonderfully named Temples of Silence.?It was a central tenet of the religion. But now birdwatchers will pay good money to travel far on bumpy roads to crouch in a hide, and risk dehydration to see these birds which are now on the verge of extinction.??

In the sub-continent they were the accidental victims of an arthritis drug.?In the early 1990s vets started injecting this into sick cows. The anti-inflammatory often allowed the cow to get up and wander off, whatever was ailing it was not however cured and the cow would die somewhere out in the fields. Hindus would not touch the sacred beast and it would be eaten by vultures. It turns out that the drug, diclofenac, was astonishingly toxic to vultures, who rapidly died from kidney failure. Unfortunately it took people a while to work all this out. The death of India’s vultures was registered early on, but nobody could figure out what was causing it. It was assumed to be some sort of pathogenic disease. By the time the puzzle was solved the vulture populations had crashed by over 98%.?Cows go uneaten and feral dog numbers have exploded leading to a rise in the prevalence of rabies.?The Temples of Silence are now truly silent, without even the swoosh of soaring vultures.?The Parsis consider burial and cremation abhorrent and, scrambling to find new ways to dispose of their dead, are experimenting with elaborate solar methods.??

Meanwhile in south-east Asia the offending drug is not, nor ever has been, used. The vultures here have undergone a slow decline from a more simple reason, lack of food. Fifty years ago the forests of eastern and northern Cambodia were home to huge herds of wild cattle and deer.?They were described as the Serengeti of Asia. And like the Serengeti there were large numbers of vultures to feed on those that died naturally or were taken by Tigers or Leopards. The French, and three decades of war reduced these herds to tiny fragments, even leading to the extinction of one species, the Kouprey. With them went the vultures. But with the catastrophic decline of the south Asian vultures, the Cambodia population suddenly took on enormous significance. What had been a curiosity, a small population of a numerous species in a little backwater, was now the last remaining stronghold. Backwaters can be refuges. And an important reminder of the importance of fringe populations. You never know when they might be important. Every bit counts.

The remarkably simple solution to their conservation in Cambodia is to give them a dead cow once in a while. Every month WCS, WWF and BirdLife put out cows at several points across the country, subsidised by birdwatchers, keen to see the three Critically Endangered species. The scene in front of the hide was a little gruesome, random bits of bovine bone dotted the clearing.??

The birds remained in the trees for hours. Eventually a bold Red-headed Vulture ventured down to the now bloated, fly-ridden carcass.?She approached it warily and took a few pecks at a nostril.?She hopped up on the head, got a good grip on a lip and tore off a strip.?This seemed to signal to all the others that had gathered in the trees that breakfast was ready.?They came swarming down, and in a few minutes the cow was covered in a squabbling, pecking, flapping mob. So far we had only seen two species, the big Red-headed Vultures, and the more numerous White-backed.?Having come all this way I still hoped to see the rarest of them all, the Slender-billed Vulture.?I was taking a short break from back strain when something new swooped in.?In my rush to take a look I cracked my head on a low beam.?As the stars cleared from my eyes I looked out at the carnage.?A Slender-billed Vulture, possibly one of fewer than a thousand left in the world, had its head rammed inside a rotting cow.?It was a special birding moment.???

The birds were beginning to get their fill.?Their crops were engorged, they staggered around on the ground, seemingly drunk on the rotten flesh.?Some managed the short flight to a nearby tree, to relax after their Sunday brunch. We hoped that some took food back to nests somewhere deeper in the forest.? Within a couple of hours little remained but skin and bones, but still enough for one more scavenger.?A Golden Jackal emerged from the grass snapping at the vultures, a bold move that worked.?The vultures backed off to let her feed.? Gradually the vultures took to the skies.?It was approaching midday and the temperature was rising.?Vultures rode the thermals and climbed high, looking to see if there was anywhere else that somebody had conveniently left a dead cow laying around.

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