The vultures saved from extinction
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
South Asian vultures started dying in huge numbers in the 1990s but no one knew why. They were on the verge of extinction before scientists worked out what was killing them. Bob Howard has been hearing from Munir Virani of the Peregrine Fund, who discovered that the vultures’ livers were being damaged when they fed on the carcasses of cattle which had been treated with a widely-used painkiller.
White-backed vultures in their enclosure at the Vulture Conservation Centre run by World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) in Changa Manga. September 20, 2017. Credit: ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello, you're listening to the BBC World Service and now the Witness History |
| 0:45.1 | podcast with me Bob Howard. Today I'm taking you back to South Asia at the end of |
| 0:50.4 | the 1990s. The vulture, a bird of prey which feeds off the dead, was itself dying in such |
| 0:57.3 | numbers it was facing extinction and nobody knew why. The rate at which these vultures were declining was really catastrophic and it got to a point where suddenly people |
| 1:15.2 | started to look around and the skies were completely empty. |
| 1:18.3 | Munir Varani is the executive vice president of the Peregrine Fund, which runs conservation projects around the world to protect birds of prey. |
| 1:27.0 | In the late 1990s, he was employed as a research biologist specializing in vultures, a bird short on glamour but high on efficiency. |
| 1:36.7 | Vultures have been around for a very long time, about 2.6 million years. |
| 1:41.7 | They are generally characterized as having bold heads, very sharp beaks. They have a |
| 1:47.8 | scavenging lifestyle. They just really exploited this niche of the ability to locate carcasses from a distance, |
| 1:55.7 | honed down onto it, and really start scavenging and rapidly consuming these carcasses. |
| 2:01.6 | They have very corrosive stomachs, the ability to eat |
| 2:05.4 | dead animals that have been around for a while that can digest up to bones as well. |
| 2:10.3 | There were so many of them in the 1970s and 1980s. |
| 2:14.0 | Munir says some people in countries like India and Pakistan saw them more as a pest than as a bird which needed protection. |
| 2:21.0 | If you had your car parked out by the roadside outside your house, |
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