In the Ramayana, the mythical bird vulture “Jatayu'' witnessed Sita being kidnapped by the demon king Ravana. When Jatayu tried to stop Ravana, he chopped Jatayu’s wings. According to the epic, Jatayu fell on a rock and was alive to tell Lord Rama about Sita’s abduction and the story goes how Rama gave ‘moksha” (liberation) to the soul of dying Jatayu.

According to the epic Ramayana, Jatayu fell on a rock in Chadayamangalam in modern day Kerala. At Chadayamangalam, the Kerala government has made a huge sculpture of Jatayu and named it Jatayu Earth Centre. 

Since my childhood I used to see these ‘Gidhdh’ everywhere. Perched on trees or hunched in the fields with their long neck buried carcass of animals. My elders used to call them harbingers of death.

Griffon vulture (Photo: Mrityunjoy Kumar Jha)

But many communities throughout the history including present day Zoroastrian (Parsi) community and Buddhists believe that being consumed by the scavenger bird liberates the spirits of the dead. 

After 15 years, when I started doing birds and wildlife photography, my learning about species started. I was told my mentors that these species are known as vultures and there are nine species of vultures in India and

During my various photography tours, I have been taking pictures of various kinds of vultures. During one of my visits to the Desert National Park in Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, I managed to “shoot” three species of vultures.

Both the Himalayan griffon (light brown) and Cinereous vulture (dark brown) are winter visitors to Desert National Park. Cinereous vultures are the largest species of vulture with a huge wingspan that can measure up to 2.8 m. Himalayan griffons are the second-largest vulture species. They can be seen in this park and in other parts of Rajasthan, sometimes together, feeding on the discarded carrion of livestock. 

Cinerous vulture, also known as monk vulture, is the largest species of vultures (Photo: Kamal Sahansi)

The Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus) is a native bird of Europe, Central Asia and Africa and in winter it travels towards Asian countries, including India. It is also called the white scavenger vulture or pharaoh's chicken and has yellow beak with black tip and big body shape, while the residential bird’s beak is totally yellow. Egyptian vultures take their waste management duties one step further by consuming the excrement of certain animals to surprising ends. The statuesque bird is distinguished from other vultures by its signature yellow face, that results from consuming the faeces of ungulates.

India has nine species of vultures in the wild and they are under the critically endangered species according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  These are the Oriental White-backed Vulture (Gyps bengalensis), Slender billed Vulture (Gyps tenuirostris), Long billed Vulture (Gyps indicus), Egyptian Vulture (Neophronpercnopterus), Red Headed Vulture (Sarcogypscalvus), Indian Griffon Vulture (Gyps fulvus), Himalayan Griffon (Gyps himalayensis), Cinereous Vulture (Aegypiusmonachus) and Bearded Vulture or Lammergeier (Gypaetus barbatus).

Today, very few people in India are aware of the fact that about 90% of the country’s vulture population has declined due to use of Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory veterinary drug. When these vultures feed on carcasses of livestock that were previously treated with Diclofenac, the drug causes renal failure in the birds, resulting in their death. The Indian Government took some initiatives to restore the vulture population, but these birds are still struggling to survive, which is not surprising considering their small clutch sizes and slow breeding rates. India banned the drug in 2006, but it is easily available in the black market. Activists are trying to promote alternatives such as meloxicam, which is relatively less harmful to vultures but more expensive.

Egyptian vulture (Photo: Mrityunjoy Kumar Jha)

The sorry story of what happened to India’s vultures is a lesson in unintended consequences. Despite the country’s 1.3bn human population, Indians coexist remarkably easily with wild animals. Now, there is a decline in the red-headed vultures with a decline of 91% and Egyptian vultures by 80%.

Today the Indian government and conservationists are hoping that their efforts to raise the number of vultures in India do not meet with Jatayu’s fate. In 2001, Asia's first vulture breeding facility Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre (JCBC) at Pinjore in Haryana, was established named after the mythical vulture “Jatayu”, to study the cause of deaths of vultures in India. Since 2006, the Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change has been carrying a conservation project for vultures and now the project is extended to 2025. For the conservation of vultures in the country, the Ministry has launched a Vulture Action Plan 2020-25. Additional Conservation Breeding centres are also being planned, one each at Uttar Pradesh, Tripura, Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal.

Vultures have a bad reputation. With their perceived ‘ugliness’ and scavenging behaviour, vultures are easy to defame. Even naturalist Charles Darwin described them as ‘disgusting’. But when you look more closely, you’ll realise the world is better off with vultures.

Vultures are often overlooked and perceived as lowly scavengers, but they play a crucial role in the environments in which they live. Their scavenging lifestyle that gives them a bad reputation is, in fact, what makes them so important for the environment, nature and society. Vultures, also known as nature’s cleanup crew, do the dirty work of cleaning up after death, helping to keep ecosystems healthy as they act as natural carcass recyclers. As the Madras High court said in its order, that “vultures are universally accepted as ‘natural sanitary workers’, absolutely essential for environmental and ecological balance. Therefore, preservation of the vulture population is non-negotiable”. They act an important function as nature’s garbage collectors and help to keep the environment clean of waste.

It is important to remember that even though the vulture species lacks the cute cuddly appearance of some endangered species, it is still a critical piece to a much larger, complex ecosystem. The world needs vultures to help control the spread of disease and pandemics.