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Getting people interested in vulture conservation can be difficult. They are never cute or cuddly, and a diet of dead animals doesn’t help.
Conservationists hope the vulture photo contest will help raise public awareness of the vultures, which play an important ecological role by disposing of their carcasses.
“People tend to think they’re ugly,” said Andre Botha, Africa project manager for the Hawk Conservancy Trust, one of the organizers of International Vulture Awareness Day, which organizes the contest. “If I don’t like it, I won’t save it.”
The Vulture Interactions photo contest, now in its second year, announced its results on July 20th. The winning photo shows a variety of vultures in action, from the northern bearded vulture, Europe’s rarest vulture, to the California condor, of which there are only about 600 birds left.
There are 23 species of vultures in the world, found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Many people face serious threats to their survival.
Species in Asia and Africa are “under tremendous pressure,” Botha said. Of the 16 Old World species found in Africa, Asia and Europe, seven are listed as endangered, and two more are at risk of extinction.
He hopes the competition will “help people understand vulture books more deeply and show them how incredibly important vultures are, rather than judging them by their covers.”
When vultures eat animal carcasses, they prevent the spread of disease due to rotting meat and save humans the trouble of cleaning up the meat. “There is no other animal on earth designed like the vulture,” said Botha, who is also co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Vulture Expert Group.
Energy infrastructure, from power lines to wind turbines, and habitat fragmentation threaten vulture populations. Vultures are also targeted by poachers who sell their body parts. This bird has excellent eyesight and is capable of spotting a 3-foot-long carcass from 4 miles away. Some people buy their own heads, believing it will give them precognitive abilities.
Addiction is the main threat. Poachers may also intentionally poison vultures to prevent them from circling overhead and paying attention to their prey. They can also poison predators such as lions and hyenas, and vultures that eat their carcasses die.
In India, the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac was introduced for veterinary use in the 1990s. The drug causes kidney failure in vultures that feed on the animals, resulting in the deaths of 95% of the country’s wild vultures in the late 2010s.
A study found that 500,000 excess human deaths may have occurred in the first five years of the 2000s because there were no vultures to stop the spread of disease or to remove stray dogs and rats that can transmit diseases to humans.
Botha said she hoped the photo contest would help promote understanding of the important role vultures play, even if people don’t yet appreciate their aesthetic appeal. “People judge them by their appearance,” he says. “It may be an involuntary evaluation of their actions.”
He also hopes the contest will help get more people interested in vulture conservation, saying: “We need young people to get involved and raise the flag.”
