BPP’s vulture venture

If a project proposed by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) succeeds, the vultures may be back at Doongerwadi in less then 18 months, but whether they will survive or not is another question. The Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) has "in principle” approved a proposal submitted by vulture expert Vibhu Prakash, BNHS principal scientist, reports Hindustan Times (HT) of March 22, 2007. The project will cost an estimated one crore rupees which will be funded initially by the BPP. Maintenance will cost 25 to 30 lakhs per year, for which the community will be approached.

Prakash, who had surveyed the Doongerwadi grounds in December 2006, feels it will be feasible to bring certain kinds of vultures – the Himalayan griffin and the white-backed vulture – to Bombay with three holding stations, two at Doongerwadi and another one built within 50 kilometers, where the birds will be quarantined.

"We are going ahead with the project,” said BPP trustee Dinshaw Mehta, who has visited the vulture breeding project run by Prakash in Pinjore, Haryana. Mehta has invited Prakash to make a presentation for the other trustees and some representatives of the community before the BPP signs a memorandum of understanding with the BNHS, the nodal executing agency.

Meanwhile, these plans received a setback when international authority on birds of prey Jemima Parry-Jones, in an e-mail to a friend, reproduced in Berjis Desai’s column Parsi Tari Arsi of March 18, 2007, noted: "They (BPP trustees) are nuts, why on earth go to all that expense and effort (to build an aviary) when firstly they are highly unlikely to get any vultures and secondly if they do and they have a corpse full of diclofenac all the birds will die anyway.”

Perhaps the pro-aviary lobby here could take a tip from a restaurant in Nepal which specializes in serving safe, healthy food – with entry reserved only for vultures. The feeding center, set up a year ago by Bird Conservation Nepal at Kawasoti near Kathmandu, will dish out fresh chemical-free carcass meals to its guests, reported HT on February 12, 2007. Nepal’s vulture population has fallen to an estimated 500 nesting pairs from at least 50,000 nesting pairs in 1990, due to eating carcasses laced with deadly diclofenac, which has now been prohibited in Nepal as well. Unfortunately, as in India, the ban is widely ignored there.

In an effort to address the special needs of the Parsi community in India, Congress president Sonia Gandhi had written to health minister Anbumani Ramadoss in May 2006, backing the ban on diclofenac for veterinary use, as per a news item in The Economic Times of February 16, 2007.