PAKISTAN: Mystery Illness kills VULTURES

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Mystery Disease Stalking Vultures in Asia

National Geographic Today

May 20, 2003

This week in Budapest, Hungary, an international gathering of scientists 

will explore how to save a creature that itself symbolizes doom: the 

vulture.

At the 6th World Conference on Birds of Prey and Owls, several sessions 

will focus on the Oriental white-backed vulture, Gyps bengalensis, once 

the most common bird of prey in Asia and possibly in the world.

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During the last decade, populations of bengalensis, and the Indian and 

slender-billed vultures�Gyps indicus and Gyps tenuirostris, respectively

�have declined by more than 90 percent in India. Scientists believe that 

the cause is infectious disease, though no one has identified the 

pathogen.

Now new research by Peregrine Fund biologists show that at some sites in 

Pakistan the birds are also disappearing rapidly. "We are losing up to one 

third of the adult population each year�about three to seven times the 

normal rate for a raptor population," says Watson. "At this rate 

bengalensis is well on its way to extinction."

Vultures play an essential ecological role as garbage collectors and 

recyclers. They rid the environment of carrion, which breed diseases�

including anthrax. In Africa, for example, vultures consume more than 70 

percent of zebra, wildebeest and other hoofed animal carcasses�not 

lions or hyenas.

"The Gyps vultures depend exclusively on livestock in India and Pakistan

�without them there would be an incredible number of dead animals 

rotting over the countryside," says Munir Virani, a biologist with the 

Peregrine Fund's Asian vulture crisis project.

Investigating the Disease

In the Changa Manga forest in Pakistan's Punjab province, researchers say 

that their vulture study may be over�not because they have solved the 

mystery of what has decimated the population, but because no more 

vultures remain.

At Changa Manga the number of active nests has fallen 

from 198 in 2001 to 49 in 2002 to just six in 2003�a decline of 97 

percent, says Virani. Similar declines have been recorded at sites 

throughout India, Nepal and Pakistan.

About nine species of vultures live in the Indian subcontinent, and each 

has a specific ecological role. Packs of wild dogs and rats are slowly filling 

the void left by bengalensis vultures.

In a remote forest region about ten miles from Chandigarh, India, in the 

foothills of the Himalayas, researchers have just opened a Vulture Care 

Center. There they will care for sick vultures and try to identify what's 

killing these species.

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0520_030520_ tvvultures.html