A ‘Vulture Restaurant’ has been established in Koderma district of Jharkhand. It is located in Gumo under Tilaiya Nagar Parishad.
Key points
- The initiative aims to address the adverse impact of livestock drugs, particularly diclofenac, on vultures.
- The restaurant spans one hectare and is designated as a feeding site for the birds.
- The vulture restaurant concept seeks to counter the dwindling vulture population.
- Forest officials are ensuring carcasses are free from diclofenac or harmful elements before serving them to vultures.
- To prevent interference from other animals, bamboo fencing has been erected around the feeding site.
- Historically abundant in Jharkhand, vultures have nearly disappeared due to the widespread use of diclofenac, a banned anti-inflammatory drug administered to livestock.
- Exposure to diclofenac-contaminated tissues leads to kidney failure in vultures.
Vultures
- Vultures are protected under schedule (1) of the Wildlife Protection Act.
- The first ‘vulture restaurant’ came up in 2015 at Phansad Wildlife Sanctuary in Raigad district of Maharashtra. There are four other such restaurants at Gadhchiroli and one at Harsul in Nashik district, all in the same state.
- Three of India’s vulture species of the genus ‘Gyps’—the long-billed (Gyps indicus) and the slender-billed (G. tenuirostris) had crashed by an astounding 97 percent, while in the white-rumped (G. bengalensis) the decline was even more catastrophic, at 99.9 between 1992 and 2007.
- The white-backed and long-billed varieties are two of the three rarest species. They are listed as ‘critically endangered’ in the Red Data List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
