Vanishing Vultures

Buzzards

    To the growing list of things to be worried about, I will add another subject which is too interesting to avoid. I first became aware of the vulture problem over a decade ago, but was reminded of it today as I read this powerful description:

“At magic hour, when the sun is gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke. When the bats leave, the crows come home. Not all the din of their homecoming fills the silence left by the sparrows that have gone missing, and the old white-backed vultures, custodians of the dead for more than a hundred million years, that have been wiped out. The vultures died of diclofenac poisoning. Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works—worked—like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait. As cattle turned into better dairy machines, as the city ate more ice cream, butterscotch-crunch, nutty-buddy and chocolate-chip, as it drank more mango milkshake, vultures’ necks began to droop as though they were tired and simply couldn’t stay awake. Silver beards of saliva dripped from their beaks, and one by one they tumbled off their branches, dead.”

   The above appears at the beginning of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and is found in a review of that book by Joan Acocella in the June 5 & 12, 2017 issue of The New Yorker.

While the new novel is a work of fiction the dramatic decline in vultures in South Asia is a fact and, in fact, diclofenac is the cause.

Sky Burials

    Perhaps you were more upset to learn  from that passage that sparrows have gone missing, but the loss of ugly buzzards should be lamented as well. In very warm countries with lots of people and animals, having carrion cleaned away quickly is a good thing. For the Parsis the loss is even more problematic since the vulture plays the role of undertaker. Bodies are left on “Towers of Silence”, exposed to the elements and to the vultures, and it is best if they are quickly removed.

 Pharmaceutical Pollution

    The disappearance of these large birds became apparent back in the 1990s as increasing numbers of vultures crossed over into the carrion category. Gradually it was determined that diclofenac was the culprit. It was widely used by veterinarians to treat cows and there are many of them in India. The drug is now banned for veterinary use in India and attempts are being made to restrict multi-dose vials for humans so as to discourage illegal use of the drugs for animals. (Some sources are provided below.)

Turkey Buzzards in Ontario

     I am pleased to report that the vulture population seems to be fine here. Apparently years ago, buzzards were fairly rare in this area. Now one sees them even in the colder months and there seems to be evidence that their range is extending north. Canadian articles relating to diclofenac are generally focussed on human consumption and I did not find any discussing veterinary use and the vulture problem.

Buzzard Day in Hinckley, Ohio

    You may not have celebrated that day or traveled to Hinckley, but you are likely aware that the buzzard has a day just like the groundhog. This year marks the 60th anniversary of “Buzzard Day” in Hinckley.  It was in 1957 that a reporter noted that someone there had kept a log which observed, over a number of years, that the buzzards always returned on March 15. Several thousand people showed up to see if it was true and a tradition was born.

Sources:

This is one of the first about the discovery of diclofenac as the cause of vulture deaths:

“A Mystery Solved, the Killer Found”, Sunny Sebastian, The Hindu, June 1,  2003 The Hindu.

“Professor Lindsay Oaks of Washington State University, working in Pakistan with the support of Peregrine Fund, has come out with the finding that Diclofenac, a widely used painkiller and anti-inflammatory drug, is behind the large-scale morbidity and mortality of the vulture species.”

A story from The New York Times:

“A Drug Used for Cattle Is Said to Be Killing Vultures,” By James Gorman, Jan. 29, 2004.

“A mysterious and precipitous plunge in the number of vultures in South Asia, which has pushed three species to the brink of extinction, is probably a result of inadvertent poisoning by a drug used widely in livestock to relieve fever and lameness, scientists reported yesterday.”

“Studies in Pakistan showed that the drug, diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory commonly prescribed for arthritis and pain in people, caused acute kidney failure in vultures when they ate the carcasses of animals that had recently been treated with it. The findings, which followed a two-year investigation by an international team of 13 scientists, were published online by the journal Nature.

Dr. J. Lindsay Oaks, an assistant professor of veterinary medicine at Washington State University who was the primary author of the report, said the devastation of vulture populations was the first clear case of major ecological damage caused by a pharmaceutical product.”

Here is the Nature citation:

“Diclofenac Residues as the Cause of Vulture Population Decline in Pakistan,”

J. Lindsay Oaks, Martin Gilbert, Munir Z. Virani, Richard T. Watson, Carol U. Meteyer and Bruce A. Rideout, Nature. 427.6975 (Feb. 12, 2004): p.630.

For Ontario buzzards see:  http://www.discover-southern-ontario.com/turkey-vulture.html

For their movement north: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/vultures-riding-north/