Vultures are Awesome.

I love vultures.

Most people can't understand why I hold such affection for the airborne scavenger. I mean, they stink to high heaven, their poop is so acidic that it will slowly kill the tree they nest in, they eat gross things and dead things that makes you uncomfortable to picture in any detail. Vultures seem ominous at first, and quite creepy with their beady eyes and long necks and bedraggled feathers.

But I love vultures.

They eat without killing. They clean up dead things that I don't want to touch. They coast on the winds, ever-circling higher and wider, hardly ever disturbing the wind currents by flapping. Their wings are tipped with long feathers that look like outstretched fingers, reaching for the opposite horizons as they dip and dive...they carry a sense of freedom and seem so detached from the Earth that I find them compelling to watch.

The vultures that habitate in my neck of the woods are Black Vultures and Turkey Vultures. They don't look like the stereotype cartoon above, though. When you picture those, you are picturing their Asian cousins in China and Tibet.

Tibetans have sent their beloved dead to their afterlives by "sky burial" for centuries, but over the past ten years, the Indian Whiterumped Vulture population has been plummeting. The 99% decrease in population stems from a single source - the use of an anti-inflammatory drug given to the cattle. Diclofenac causes kidney failure when digested by the vultures who clean up the corpses of cattle who are killed or who fall sick and die.

There was an article in the BBC today: "A Decade to Save Asian Vultures"

Asian vultures could be extinct in the wild within 10 years unless a livestock drug blamed for their rapid demise is eliminated, scientists warn.
A survey showed that the population of the oriental white-backed vulture had crashed by 99.9% since 1992.
India has banned the manufacture of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug for cattle, but it is still on sale to the nation's farmers, the team says. The findings appear in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society...(click here for more)

There is a perfectly good substitute for Diclofenac called Meloxicam, which is currently more expensive for the farmers to afford. Let's hope that is remedied soon before an awesome bird is wiped off the face of this planet.

Here's a closer look into why I love the local relative of the Asian Whiterumped Vulture, the Turkey Vulture, as presented by BirdandMoon.com (who also has links to great ways to help birds struggling to live in cities).