Simon Thomsett

Category: India, vultures | Date: Dec 17 2007 | By: admin

21st Nov 2007.

India trip. Background.
21 Nov to 10th Dec 2007.

To many the word ‘Africa’ has a warm timbre, but I guess because I was born in it, it has nowhere near the same resonance as ‘India’. As a child I remember Riki Tiki Tavi, The Jungle Book and the Man-eaters of Kamoun. These were the standard English literature reading of my generation. Kipling and Corbett’s world portrayed the natural history side of India, perhaps now superseded (from the westerner’s point of view) by a spiritual hankering for personal betterment. I guess the westerner is greatly impressed by the sight of millions living in total poverty in terrible conditions. So was I but for different reasons. We have the same problems at home, and it is very rapidly expanding. One year the plains may be filled with zebra, the next it is covered in shanty dwellings and desperate people. In India the difference is that it has history and the poor seem to accept it with astonishing peace. I suppose they do have spiritual lessons for us all if, as is the inevitable prediction, the whole world will be a shuffling herd of back to back humanity. The spiritual side of things is likely to continue for a while and I have a panicked urgency to see its nature before it goes.

I am an infrequent traveller because I can seldom get away from the captive collection of raptors and animals at home. But now with so few it is possible to do so. My last overseas trip was in 2003, again to India. Then I was a bit of a mess, having just survived being shot at in my living room on two separate occasions. That trip greatly helped, and gave me time out to look back on my home and situation. I vowed then to leave my home and work, but four years on I remain in much the same situation simply because I know of no other way to live. It had to take another personal ’shake-up” to justify this trip. Perhaps after-all I believed that I would have clarity in India that would not be possible to have at home. Although it was not to be a working trip in the usual sense I had clear goals to set. First, to catch up on Indian raptor affairs, second to be with friends. Third, to think and to make plans regarding my birds, home, work and personal life.

In the last few days before leaving I put some of the birds, such as the Lammergeyer in a small shed. The Black Sparrowhawk with the spinal fracture (who is doing so much better……but flies sideways) was put in another walled-off enclosure. I rushed around giving instructions and counter instructions to Mwanzia and Jonathan who patiently took in everything (or erased it as the case may be). During my absence they had to make one trip to a nearby chicken farm to get day old chicks, the staple food for the hawks. This was to be the first time in more than seven years that I entrusted my vehicle to be used for the once a week (or sometime once a fortnight) trip to collect bird food. After staff and volunteers had wrecked a total of 5 vehicles supposedly doing this simple chore in the past, I have reasonable cause to be terrified of this small favour. It is vital of course and has moulded my life for decades. They assured me endlessly that all would be well and that I should go in peace and not fret.

The flight.
I have the perennial misfortune on planes to sit next to the person with the most highly contagious chest complaint of all the passengers. The moment I looked down the aisle my eye caught sight of a spluttering swarthy character and I knew without checking my boarding pass where I was destined to sit. The second I sat down he was immediately discombobulated with limbs disjointed and covered all three seats. My best threatening smile did no good. Despite firmly taking possession of the arm rest and pushing my elbows a fraction into “his” space, he remained unmoved and smiled pleasantly back between heaving coughs which he made no effort to cover. Damn I thought; I’m going to start this trip sick. Consciously I breathed in as little as I could, assuming that this would be a sure way to avoid the germs. But hours into the flight and feeling slightly ill I resumed breathing, only to have him remove his shoes. Man alive! I kid you not, the stench swivelled the heads of those in all rows around us. He knew no known language of course, and was immune to body language and gestures that even a horse would understand.
I resumed the “battle for space” again, filled out my frame and took some command. I even experimented by keeping my elbow on the rest against his, and pushed infinitesimally harder. Although our eyes were firmly fixed on the dirty overhead TV screen placed at an awkward angle to our right the struggle achieved full-fledged arm wrestle standards, until the stewardess arrived and asked if I preferred vegetarian or non-vegetarian.
I landed at Mumbai and then caught a plane to Delhi at dawn. Looking out the window at the diffuse orange glow the sun barely permeated a sulphurous haze stretching from ground level to far above the plane. This smog was with us uninterrupted the entire way. This is one of the most polluted places on earth. In Delhi I was met by Manjeet Sharma our “agent”, and swiftly driven away, through near choking acidic fumes and unbelievably busy streets humming with 3 wheeler taxis, road-side kiosks, ambling cows, defecating dogs and children and massive billboards with pictures of gorgeous green-eyed Indian ladies and handsome fellows with shades and torn shirts. You have to physically flick a switch in your brain and not dwell on a fleeting glimpse of a crippled destitute, a dog licking something suspicious on the road, a sari clad group of women, glitzy city types, the crows and dull cows holding up traffic. Affluence and effluence all in one frame. The driving is special though. The idea is that you floor it as fast as you can to the rear end of the vehicle in front of you, then slam on your brakes, violently jerk the steering wheel and hit the horn. Although it is now against the law to hoot in Delhi the lorries all have painted signs on the back saying “Please hoot the horn”. It is madness.

In 2003 I went to join The Peregrine Fund to meet up with my Kenyan colleague Munir Virani, and Pat Benson. They were busy working on the vultures that had suffered some 95% population declines during the preceding 7 years or so. It is now common knowledge that this decline was due to a pain relieving drug called diclofenec. It is commonly used globally for humans, but the veterinary use allows it to be ingested by vultures. Formerly vultures numbered in their thousands in cities and towns as do the still roaming cattle. Should an ailing cow be encountered the Hindu especially may feel a religious obligation to help. For only a few rupees the cow can get pain relief, but should it soon die it has the ability to kill 100 or more vultures. Why? Birds and reptiles have very efficient kidneys. Diclofenec like many non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs affect kidney function, and can if used incorrectly destroy human and mammal kidneys too. Some 1000 people die of related problems each year. But in birds a tiny amount will stop kidney function. Crystals of urates fill the joints, and body cavities and the bird dies in agony. What little that can be said in defence of the use of this drug is that at least it was done in the hope of lessening animal suffering. It was not deliberate, as is the case of wanton poisoning in much of Africa. But the use of this drug in veterinary care is so widespread and so much part of the cultural approach to animal care that it will result in the extinction of vultures, and many scavenging bird species. It isn’t the first time that an animal welfare concept has back-lashed and caused such havoc for wildlife, I suspect it is the rule.

This catastrophe equals, if exceeds the global effect of persistent agro-chemicals on raptors during the 1960s, but still struggles to be given the same public acknowledgement. Perhaps because the subjects undergoing declines are scavenging birds, pariahs of wildlife, and the unglamourous undertakers few care. Or perhaps people are suffering from “caring fatigue”. We just have too much to consider and worry about these days. But put in their rightful perspective, there can be no other group of animals more valuable to the environment (and rural human life), than those that clean it up. Now that I personally have stepped out of the conservation arena and can allow some unbiased objectivity I can imagine no more important field in raptor conservation than this. It should rank very high up the global agenda for conservation as a whole. We are not talking of species conservation here for nice ethical reasons; we are talking of ecological health of an environment shared with a billion and more humans that are expected to be adversely affected.

The Peregrine Fund was in large part was responsible for discovery of the cause of vulture loss in India and Pakistan and Munir and Pat continued to play a critical role in monitoring the vulture numbers. The RSPB too contributed enormously to the awareness and support of the ban on the veterinary production of diclofenec. Now after the ban the hope is to see a recovery. It occurred to me during a soul searching moment that in a field in which happy endings and positive outcomes are so rare (conservation), to be there and witness a recovery is too good a thing to miss.
In 2003 I was able to tag along a see for myself the vultures and other raptors for myself. My impressions then were mixed. India is huge. It is surprisingly well wooded. For example an area nearly the size of Kenya is protected indigenous forest land, mostly on hills to conserve water supplies. This is quite separate from the protected wildlife parks and sanctuaries. Land use is more communal, orderly and productively managed. For the most part people live in villages or communities and move out each day to till the land and tend to livestock, rather than stake a land claim and pitch a house in the middle of a tiny fenced-off area. There are almost no fences. That’s a good lesson for most of Africa. The country-side and valleys do not reverberate with the sound of incessant tree felling as is the case at home. Most of the food is cooked on efficient stoves using cow pats and grass. People plant trees, indigenous ones mostly……..not soil killing and thirsty eucalyptus. Attitudes to wildlife are one of high tolerance. Langur Monkeys sit side by side with people on busy streets and roof tops, Nilgai antelope graze cereal crops without harassment, mynas, crows and treepies sit within arms reach. Leopards are given names and walk through villages and towns at night. Tigers and elephants aren’t considered a problem until they have killed quite a few people. This level of reverence for wildlife is something we in Kenya simply do not have today. But I have learnt not to be naïve and assume that all is well and that there is a Utopian world in which people live in harmony with wildlife. It is said of Kenya, repeated ad nauseam until one must believe it or fall out of line, despite the facts indicating the very reverse. Wildlife poaching is silent and rampant in India, conducted perhaps even more undetected because of the exoskeleton of seemingly harmonious cultural attitudes. But whether or not poaching exists is largely immaterial to the whole. India like Africa faces no future for wildlife if is continues to have a burgeoning human population. One cannot help but be impressed that despite the numbers of people tigers do still roam their jungles. There is hope, and we can learn from them many important lessons for African conservation.

We ‘did’ the famous reserves not because we enjoyed being sidetracked by leopards and tigers, but because we wanted to see vultures.
There are 3 Gyps species very similar to the 2 species we have in East Africa. They are the Oriental White-backed, Long billed and Slender billed Vultures. The Oriental is perhaps too readily compared to the African White-backed, and the other two are more like our Rüppell’s ‘Griffon’ Vultures. The smaller Oriental White-back has declined the fastest, and is virtually extinct in a vast area of its former range. For no very good reason the Long-billed appears to be still holding on, relatively speaking, at its breeding colonies. It was odd to stand looking up at a cliff face in Bandhavgarh and see more vultures than would be encountered in even the largest colonies in Kenya. That could mean that Kenyan Rüppell’s were not doing so good or that Indian vultures weren’t doing so bad. Or that one had a heck of a lot more work to do before one could offer a reasonable opinion.

The “team”.

Tomorrow I hope to be meeting up with Munir and Pat again. Munir is very organised and thorough and has the energy necessary to drive the process. Munir and I worked together in Kenya on raptor projects for many years. Munir knows India well, he was a keen cricketer and has visited for many years. He has played an important role in the vulture conservation process. I was at first scared of Pat. Someone in India said he looked like a professional wrestler and I knew he has a reputation for zero frivolity in the field. But Pat is actually a soft-hearted man. He has done a tremendous amount of work on the Cape Vultures in South Africa. Munir and Pat together are a formidable team. Laila Bahaa-el-din is joining us too. Laila is already in India working at Kipling Camp in Kanha. She was my last volunteer at home in Kenya in August who despite being discouraged from turning up ignored my warning and still came. Laila helped fly the birds, went on many field trips and helped catch vultures in the Mara. She wishes to do a PhD soon and this may prove a great learning experience although I suspect her calling is more for big cats. I also hope to learn a lot on this trip. We make an odd team to be sure.