Extinct SE Asia Vulture Found
Posted by: Loren Coleman on February 7th, 2007
The only known colony in Southeast Asia of slender-billed vultures (Gyps tenuirostrishas) – shown above – have been discovered in Cambodia, along with other endangered bird species. The vulture colony was discovered in January 2007, in the rainforests east of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s Stung Treng Province, according to Michael Casey’s Associated Press Bangkok-based dispatch for February 7, 2007.
The slender-billed vultures were believed extinct throughout Southeast Asia, including Thailand and Cambodia, and only having been found in northern India recently. Some call it the world’s rarest vulture.
We discovered the nests on top of a hill where two other vulture species were also found….Amazingly, there were also a host of other globally threatened species of birds and primates. It’s a very special place….We already have a successful WCS model working in the northern plains where local people benefit from conservation activities,” he said. “I think we have a good chance of making it work here if we can find the support.Song Chansocheat, Cambodia Vulture Conservation Project
The team also spotted a red-headed vulture, giant ibis and an endangered primate called a silvered langur, or leaf monkey.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
How wonderful that this vulture has been found, when several other species have been brought literally to the very brink of extinction – within the past decade or so! – at the hand of humankind.
People have wiped out the vultures in India and parts of Pakistan over the course of little more than a decade on a scale that approaches that of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. The pogrom was unintentional this time; the millions of vultures have not been deliberately slaughtered – but they are gone all the same. As many of 95% or more of four species of Gyps vultures, some of which were some of the most numerous birds in Asia, have been wiped out.
The search for the cause of the vultures’ precipitous decline reads like a detective novel. It took a few years for the decline in vultures to be noticed. Then for a few more years it was thought that a previously unknown virus was killing them by the millions. But the real cause of the decline was a shocker: they are being poisoned by arthritis medicine.
It turns out that in India, modern pharmaceuticals are easily and cheaply available, and just about every person can obtain just about any kind of prescription medicine. One of those medicines is diclofenac, an NSAID that is used to treat arthritis and other pain in humans and also in livestock.
It’s now known that diclofenac, which the vultures ingested from the carcasses of livestock, causes sudden, catastrophic, irreversible kidney failure.
Diclofenac was very popular among livestock owners in India. And in India, they relied on the native vultures, which numbers in the many millions, to clear away the millions of carcasses of animals that die every year.
The discovery that the birds were dying of diclofenac poisoning came about almost by accident, in one of those instances of serendipity that occur from time to time in scientific endeavor.
Biologists are working feverishly to try to remove nestlings from the wild and place them in secure captive breeding programs, to hold them in trust until all traces of diclofenc have been eradicated from the environment. Diclofenac has now been banned for veterinary use in India, but clearing the country of all traces of the drug may take decades.
That’s why the news about this vulture is such good news.
I also imagine that DDT is still in use in many developing nations, and bird flu is taking its toll on many species. Great news though, and more surprises on in the horizon from the Mekong.
Kittenz, that was a very informative and fascinating post as usual. Amazing the kind of damage mankind can have without even realizing it. This kind of stuff just ends up causing a ripple effect right up through the ecosystem. I am happy to hear the problem has been addressed although it appears for some that it is too late. Sad.
Hopefully the problem was identified in time to prevent the total extinction of the vultures. There are four species that have been brought to the brink of extinction, with upwards of 95% of the birds dead in some cases, and several other species have been affected to a lesser but significant degree, but at least the captive breeding programs have been implemented. Although the number of birds rescued for those programs so far is pitifully small, maybe it is enough to stave off extinction.
The most recent information I’ve seen is an article in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. There is also a lot of information about this online, and in other publications, but the article in Smithsonian is especially fascinating. I had been following this tragedy for some years, but I was unaware of how important the vultures are – or rather were – to India’s economy and the health of its people before I read the Smithsonian article.