Vultures of Mumbai
Posted by Dylan on July 2, 2009I came to Mumbai to witness the return of the vultures. I’ve heard about their reappearance through a friend of mine who lives not to far from Kolkata. She’s been one of the few Parsi activists pursuing a different way other than leaving the dead on the ‘Tower of Silence’ because it’s been sited that a number of the vultures have dwindled in an alarming rate around Mumbai and around Kolkata.
I met her in the lobby of one of the 5 Star Mumbai Hotels, and we went off to observe the skies of Kolkata. She told me that it was definitely good news for the Parsi community and that a man who was the first to photographer of piles of half-eaten, rotting bodies from the Tower and who live in Mumbai, vigourously campaigned for ending this ageless ritual practice of leaving corpses to be fed by vultures. It has been proven that it hasn’t worked. The vultures have disappeared and died with the indiscriminate cutting down of tall palm trees and particularly around the Tower itself. The disappearance was notice back in 2005 and the disappearance has been attributed to the overuse and widespread use of Diclofenac, which is a medicine to treat cattle with which these birds feed on.
Recently, around two dozen of the vultures have been sighted near the Race Course and the nests were spotted on a few tall trees near the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. Suggesting that the birds are once again breeding. Forest officials and bird-lovers have described the development as wonderful news. The forest department has begun to launch a vulture breeding program at the Buxa Tiger Reserve in the Northern part of Bengal. As we arrived to Kolkata, I look out the windshield of the car and saw several vultures circling and riding the thermals high up in the sky and my friend and I smile.
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