2001 Newsletter - The Peregrine Fund

An Unexpected
Christmas Present
In place of the plastic reindeers of home were richly
To my mind, Christmas
is a time for family and
by Martin Gilbert friends. Visions of
frosty days, log fires, mantles draped in
sprays of holly and mistletoe. At first
glance, it is hard to relate these images
to a Christmas spent in rural Pakistan
studying dying vultures! To most eyes
the vulture is hardly an evocative subject,
with its scrawny serpentine neck
and unsavory table manners, it holds
none of the romance of the Bald Eagle
or the Peregrine Falcon. Surely only a
madman would spend the festive
season searching for such a bird, in a
remote land where Christmas is not
celebrated and a whiskey toast to the
New Year is an unknown pleasure?! I
have to admit that many a friendly eyebrow
was raised when I announced
that I would be leaving Scotland in
December to join The Peregrine Fund’s
Asian Vulture Crisis Project. However,
that was all a year ago and I am happy
to report that both the vultures and
Pakistan proved the doubters wrong!
Colorful Pakistan was both a surprise
and a joy to visit. The local’s own
festival, the Islamic Eid el Fitr, fell by
happy coincidence just two days after
my own Christmas day. While my
friends at home were busy sending
Christmas cards and choosing their
tree, Pakistan was buzzing to an anticipation
of its own. At the time I was
based in the provincial town of Dera
Ghazi Khan along the western bank of
the mighty Indus River. Late night
shoppers hurried over their purchases
of gifts and treats. The streets were
filled with the scents of dishes being
prepared and with bubbling wide-eyed
20
children brimming with excitement. In
place of the plastic reindeers of home
were stoic donkeys trimmed in tassels
and bells, and richly decorated camels,
their ankle-bracelets clinking as they
strode past. As with Christmas at home,
Eid was a happy season, marked only
by the warmth and overwhelming hospitality
of the Pakistani people.
By this time, life within the vulture
colonies was also full of activity. Most
pairs were on nests, the parents sharing
the burden of incubating their single
white eggs. Four long months of hard
work stretched ahead of them before
the chicks would leave their tree-top
platforms and make their way into the
brewing heat of a Punjabi spring. But
for now the colonies were shrouded in
the chill of winter. Early morning mists
blanketed the gnarled rows of sheesham
trees, retreating with the rise of
the winter sun. By mid-morning, air
would begin lifting in columns from
the warming fields of cotton and newly
planted wheat. Large groups of vultures
would circle together, climbing the
thermals, dispersing high over the
plains in the search for food. At times
several hundred could be seen together,
spiraling upward against a lapis-blue
sky. A truly magnificent sight, yet all
activity at the colonies was not of a
feathered nature.
On the ground below the trees two
young men were carefully pacing the
colony, recording the activity at the
nests, while engaged in a second and
more sinister task: the search for dead
and dying birds. Shakeel Ahmed and
Jamshed Chaudhry, two Pakistani students
working with the Ornithological
Society of Pakistan, under the training
and coordination of The Peregrine
Fund, had been charged with a vital job.
With reports of dead and dying vultures
coming from as far away as Asam in
northeastern India (1,500 miles to the
east), Shakeel and Jamshed, along with
their colleagues in two further Pakistani
vulture colonies, were working hard to
piece together vital fragments of information
in a conservation jigsaw puzzle
stretching across an entire subcontinent.
Stories of drastic declines in local
populations of the Oriental Whitebacked
Vulture and two close relatives,
the Slender-billed and Cliff Vultures,
had become depressingly frequent over
the proceeding months. The picture
that was emerging was a bleak one. The
populations of these three species had
dwindled to a fraction of their former
size, or vanished entirely over much, if
not all, of their former range. More
shocking still was the speed with which
the situation had unfolded. Where a
decade ago many hundreds of pairs
had nested in what were apparently
healthy colonies, the trees now stood
empty. It appeared that India had
borne the brunt of the losses, with
Nepal also heavily affected. Pakistan, it
seemed, was yet to experience declines
as dramatic as elsewhere, and apparently
still boasted large colonies of the
Oriental White-backed Vulture, at least.
Work was demanding, there was a
lot to do, and little time left to ponder
Christmas back home. While the students
tirelessly paced their colonies
marking nests and recording occupancy,
I was busy refining their studies,
taking time to survey other sites, and