As it flies toward the sun, it senses the warm current of air and covers itself with its outstretched wings, which extend up to 7 feet from one end to the other. In the excitement of his youth, he goes further than ever, much further than he should. Too late, he realizes this, as he feels the heat of the sun scorching his wings.
This is not a cautionary tale of Icarus. This is an Indian story, and its moral is different.
Sampati sees his younger brother stumbling. Always alert, he yells at him to slow down, to turn back, but his brother doesn’t listen. Finally, with a powerful stroke of its wings, the larger vulture rushes forward and shelters its brother under its wings. He feels his wings burnt by the heat of the sun and falls towards the earth, wingless, powerless, consoled only by the thought that he has saved his brother.
Sampati is a deity, a vulture, who is said to have been born just a short distance from where we stood, staring at a majestic rock in the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh.
Vultures are one of the largest flying birds in the world. With wings longer than a tall man, they take to the skies, often flying more than 100 km a day in search of food. Nature’s cleaning service, these scavengers can clean a dead body down to the bones within hours. He has not received due credit in India’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. It seems that we always give less importance to the services of nature, doesn’t it?
Sadly, the vulture population in India has declined from 40 million to about 30,000 in the last 30 years; The result of the vulture version of the opioid epidemic.
Diclofenac, introduced in 1973, has become one of the world’s most widely prescribed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs); A pain reliever of choice, if you prefer. Generic versions came on the market in 1993 and veterinary versions came to India soon after. Farmers started giving it to old cattle to reduce their pain. When those animals died, the medicine stuck around and was passed on to vultures, which ate their corpses.
Gyps vultures, commonly found in India, lack the enzyme machinery used by other animals to break down diclofenac, or have only weakened versions of it, making even small doses fatal. The drug rapidly damages their kidneys and, as uric acid levels rise, the bird’s organs become coated in white, toothpaste-like deposits. Death occurs soon thereafter.
Even low concentrations of the drug can affect the vulture’s body. And because they are social feeders and congregate on the same carcass, a single stained carcass can be claimed by multiple birds. This is tragic irony at its finest: a sanitation worker laid off from his job due to the collapse of his body’s waste-management system.
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It’s strange to think that something so innocuous would wipe out an entire species.
The range of “novel entities” within the planetary boundaries framework, developed by Johan Rockström, warns against the uncontrolled release of synthetic chemicals, plastics and engineered materials that the Earth system cannot safely handle. The vulture is the canary in that coal mine.
Now I look at the Vovoron Gel on my bedside table with fresh guilt.
Vibhu Prakash, former deputy director of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), was among the first to notice that India’s vultures were disappearing from the forests. In the 1980s, as a young researcher in Keoladeo National Park, he observed thousands of them; When he returned in the 1990s, they had all disappeared. Who remained sitting with a bent neck for a few days before falling dead.
Food was not the issue. “In fact, when cattle died, people would leave them nearby because vultures would clean them up quickly,” he says. “Now, it takes days to eat the dead bodies.”
Nesting sites were also available. None of the tissue samples tested contained pesticides at concentrations high enough to cause reproductive failure or death. There was no explanation for the degradation he was witnessing. Given that raptors that eat fish and birds appear unaffected, pesticides do not appear to be the cause.
Could there be something in the dead bodies?
Soon after, scientists found vultures in Pakistan dying in the same manner, and found diclofenac residues in their tissues. They then fed diclofenac-laced buffalo meat to captive birds to test their hypothesis; The vultures died. Prakash’s team tested tissue samples from across India: three-quarters of the dead vultures had visceral arthritis, and all of those samples contained diclofenac. They published their findings in 2004.
There was no doubt: diclofenac was killing vultures. Prakash knew that a ban would be effective only if there was a safe alternative. After extensive study, researchers decided on meloxicam as an alternative, which is widely used to treat raptors in zoos. He tested it for safety, then made his recommendation.
India banned the veterinary use of diclofenac in 2006. But deviations from human formulations continued, leading to limits on package sizes in 2015. Other drugs equally toxic to vultures remain, some of which have been banned since 2022.
Although the deep decline has been halted, the crisis continues.
A 2025 report by research firm Wildlife Institute of India, based on the number of nesting sites, shows that vultures have disappeared from about 75% of historical nesting sites in the country (though they have appeared in some new places). Nesting sites are now dangerously concentrated, with about half the breeding population living in two states, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Within Madhya Pradesh, about one third of the Indian vulture breeding population resides in Panna.
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Panna – forests, meadows, valleys – is one of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen.
It develops as a series of plateaus, rising to about 500 m above sea level, before falling sharply towards the Ken River near the Madla area.
We entered the sanctuary on this high plateau, and were almost immediately met with a lovely scent; Our guide explained that it came from American mint, an aggressive substance that no animal will eat, and which destroys the edible grass around it. Beauty, here, was a cloak for danger.
Our next safari took us to the Hinauta area, halfway down and past a diamond mine. The emerald – so lovely, so precious – feels surrounded on all sides: by fields, by villages, by mines and by the river. That morning, there was a dense mist over the grassland, making the beauty of the place supernatural. Our chatty guide was describing the park’s efforts to sensitize local schoolchildren to wildlife when we spotted it: an orange and white ghost glinting through the mist. For a moment, the world became limited to just her and us, and then she moved to the dry riverbed, and melted back into the fog.
Then our guide took us to Dhundua Seha or Vulture Point. Below us is a huge semi-circular “amphitheater” of striated gray rock, carved by Kane over centuries. I saw vultures flying – many singly, some in pairs – carrying grass and twigs to build their nests in rock crevices. They are social birds, after all, and nest close together. How few before us understood this wonder: the remains of the remains, the survivors charged with raising the next generation. But in our eagerness to “see” the next tiger we moved ahead.
Charisma matters. Gyps vultures are listed as Critically Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List; By comparison, the tiger is now only endangered. Yet the tiger attracts attention, even reverence. Everyone holds their breath when someone passes; Time slows down, as orange streaks move through the brush.
In contrast, the vulture is a bald, voluptuous bird that hovers awkwardly over rotting carcasses. Important, but hard to love.
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The absence of these birds from intact habitats and carcass piles is worrying, suggesting that their populations have been greatly reduced and are not recovering, perhaps due to the continued presence of vulture-poisoning drugs.
Their life cycle compounds the problem. “Vultures lay one egg a year. Only half the chicks reach adulthood,” says Prakash. “They start reproducing at the age of five or six. If adult mortality rises above 5%, extinction becomes possible. During the diclofenac years, mortality rates exceeded 40%. It was devastating.”
Their loss hurts us.
A University of Chicago study titled The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India examined a series of data from 1988 to 2005 and found that, in districts where the bird previously thrived, all-cause human mortality increased by more than 4% after its extinction. This resulted in 104,386 additional annual deaths in the selected population.
This “hygiene shock” was the result of nature, which abhors a vacuum, filling the holes left by vultures in less hygienic ways. The study published in 2024 found an increase in sales of anti-rabies vaccines, an indicator of increased wild-dog populations in vulture-friendly districts. Economist and co-author of the paper Ananth Sudarshan told me that stray dogs alone are not responsible for all the excess deaths. The increasing rat population and deteriorating water quality also contribute to this, causing urban areas to be more affected.
A grainy photo of 1980s Delhi shows hundreds of vultures gathering over a pile of dead bodies. Fast forward to today, and dogs are wreaking havoc at festival sites. Vultures are uniquely adapted to handling meat: bald heads that remain clean; An exceptionally acidic stomach to keep infections under control. Their options are not as well optimized. Even if we address stray dogs (with vaccines), rats and poor water quality, the impact on productivity and quality of life will continue.
Efforts are being made to help him recover. BNHS has established captive-breeding sites in collaboration with forest departments and other research organizations, of which Pinjore has been the most successful. Earlier this year, 34 vultures were released from here into the forests of Maharashtra. Although some are lost, Prakash remains hopeful. “Vultures can adapt. They will not return to previous numbers, but they can be saved from extinction. We know how to breed them and how to reproduce them. But poisonous drugs should be banned immediately, and any new molecules should be tested on scavenging birds before they are introduced. This is vital to ensure the survival of vultures.”
Returning to the story we started with, the brother that Sampati protects is Jatayu, the bird who tries to save Sita from Ravana and dies; The only creature whose last rites are performed by Ram.
I wonder what he would say about the plight of his relatives today.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watersheds. She can be reached at tradeoffs@climateaction.net. Views expressed are personal)
