A River Runs Again by Meera Subramanian

Author:Meera Subramanian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-06-16T19:17:30+00:00

The Indian scientific community collaborated with international colleagues through the newly formed Asian Vulture Crisis Project to identify the cause of the crash. Scientists initially speculated that an infectious disease or bioaccumulation of pesticides could be the culprit, like DDT had been for predatory birds in Europe and North America. Rumors blamed Americans—“so technologically advanced,” the Indians like to quip—for producing some new chemical that was killing the vultures, or for gathering them up in planes to take to some undisclosed location.

Strangely, even though millions of birds were missing, scientists found it difficult to get their hands on carcasses fresh enough to test. The Indian government had clamped down on biopiracy—the use of natural materials for commercial profit—after a US company attempted to patent a pesticidal extract from the Indian neem tree in the 1980s. These new restrictions meant that, even when biologists had fresh vulture remains, they couldn’t export them for testing abroad. Conducting tests within India was unsuitable because of insufficient equipment and accepted standards. Pakistan proved more welcoming.

It would take minds from many nations to unravel the riddle of the vulture decline. Vibhu worked closely with Andrew Cunningham, a veterinary pathologist with the Institute of Zoology in London, but ultimately it was American Lindsay Oaks, a soft-spoken microbiologist at Washington State University who collaborated with the US-based nonprofit The Peregrine Fund to isolate the cause. Lindsay began his investigation in Lahore in November 2000, when he met Munir Virani, a Peregrine Fund raptor biologist from Kenya (and a newlywed who had to leave his bride at home in Nairobi most of that crisis-filled year), and Patrick Benson, a biologist and American expat living in South Africa.

“As soon as I walked out of the hotel in Lahore, we saw vultures roosting in Lawrence Park right in the middle of town,” Lindsay recalled later from his home in Washington state. “They were all along the roads outside of town and at the three colonies we went to, there were a thousand birds and nests all over the place. It was the same as seeing a starling here.” Such vulture sightings had all but vanished from India, where the crisis was more advanced. The deaths seemed to be moving in a wave across South Asia, originating in India.

These three scientists traveled to the Changa Manga forest, named after bandits who roamed the area in the British era. Still abundant with vultures, it was surrounded by vast agricultural lands in the fertile Punjab sliced in half during Partition. The forest was close enough to India that the vultures, which cover vast territory in their aerial meanderings, could have easily flown over the fields where Umendra Dutt’s farmers were experimenting with organics. Lindsay wrote later of the wonder he experienced as he watched “entire vulture colonies, which can contain hundreds of birds, all rising up together and out of sight in a giant column.” At Changa Manga and several other sites in Pakistan, scientists were able to start collecting carcasses of dead birds for testing.

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