Krishna Prasad Bhusal

Vulture Safe Zone (VSZ) is an area surrounding one or more wild vulture nesting colonies, large enough to encompass the mean foraging range and completely free from vulture toxic drug diclofenac.
The world’s first Vulture Safe Zone namely Gandaki-Lumbini VSZ being declared from Nepal during the 11th annual general meeting of Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction (SAVE) on 2nd December 2021. This VSZ covers the nesting, roosting and foraging areas of vultures in the Gandaki and Lumbini province of Nepal.
SAVE is a consortium of 24 partners working together to save Asia’s Globally Threatened Vultures. The Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, National Trust for Nature Conservation and Bird Conservation Nepal are partners of SAVE from Nepal.

Nepal initiated a pioneering idea in the world of working with local communities to establish a Vulture Safe Zone in 2009. The continuous effort with the strong partnership of government, a conservation organization, community, vets, pharmacies and livestock owners over ten years made the provisional VSZ fully safe for vultures. The declaration of a VSZ is based on recent pharmacy surveys showing that veterinary diclofenac has been removed from sale and no NSAID-caused mortality of GPS-tagged vultures, coupled with high survival rates typical of Gyps vultures.

The boundaries of the approved VSZ are determined by the areas where the tagged birds spent most of their time and survived. The successful removal of diclofenac and increase in the use of meloxicam (the vulture-safe alternative to diclofenac) resulted in the vulture population recovery in Nepal. The recovery of populations of two Critically Endangered vulture species in Nepal is linked directly to the progress of Nepal’s Vulture Safe Zone.
Vultures, the most efficient scavenging birds, play a highly important ecological role through the rapid consumption of animal carcasses. They also have an important cultural role in the consumption of human dead bodies in sky burials within Nepal and Tibet.

Based on a priest’s advice, Lama people in the Trans Himalayan range and other cultures including the Sherpa, the dead body is cut into pieces and offered to vultures. In this dry environment where burial and incineration are impossible, vultures are the cleaner of the environment.
In Hindu mythology, a vulture is said to be the carrier of God Sani (Saturn); and a vulture struggled with Ravana to stop the kidnap of Sita in the Ramayan. Vultures that were very common in the decade of 1990s are in grave danger of extinction across the Indian subcontinent in early 2000.

The cause behind such steep declination has been the veterinary drug diclofenac, which is widely used to treat livestock in Asia. Vultures are highly susceptible to diclofenac, and they are exposed to the drug through the carcasses of treated livestock. Vultures that consume sufficient tissue from diclofenac-treated animal carcasses induced kidney failure with clinical signs of visceral gout.

To halt and reverse this vulture decline in Nepal, both in-situ and ex-situ conservation activities have been practised. In the beginning, the big challenge was removing diclofenac from the veterinary system. There was ignorance of the issue and the solutions across government, civil society and the private sector. The sheer geographical scale of the problem and how to work across such huge areas brought its challenges.
The Government of Nepal banned the production and use of veterinary diclofenac in 2006 and prepared and implemented the Vulture Conservation Action Plan for Nepal (2009-13) and (2015-19). The main objective of the Action Plan is to prevent the extinction of vulture species by ensuring re-introduction, safe food supply, maintenance of suitable habitat and a better understanding of the ecological importance of these birds in Nepal to revive the viable population of vultures in the wild. Since 2002, the vulture recovery programme initiated an integrated approach, which involves advocacy, education, monitoring, research, captive breeding, supplementary feeding and site protection. There have been national, regional and local government legislation and commitments at a community level for more than ten years.

Scientifically validating and recognising the world’s first truly Vulture Safe Zone from Nepal is a proud moment and a great achievement. The eventual recovery of vultures in Asia will be enhanced if it is possible to protect and retain small but key remaining vulture populations in the wild through creating Vulture Safe Zones. Following this lead, VSZs are now being implemented in Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and in African countries too.

Although the veterinary use of diclofenac is completely removed from Nepal, other painkiller drugs Nimesulide, Aceclofenac and Ketoprofen are available in the market which are proven toxic to vultures. To ensure the recovery of critically endangered vultures in Nepal, all vulture-toxic drugs available for veterinary use need to be banned or removed from the environment.

Besides drugs, there might be other undergoing threats causing the problem to small populations of vultures in Nepal such as carcass poisoning, human persecution, electrocution, localised shortage of food due to alternative disposal mechanisms of carcasses etc. which may prevent vulture populations from returning to pre-decline numbers. To prevent a manmade near-extinction, continuous conservation efforts to strengthen Vulture Safe Zone need to be taken.
Transboundary collaboration on vulture conservation with India should greatly improve not only between conservation bodies but at the government official level as the vultures roam far and wide and do not respect international boundaries.

(Bhusal is IUCN Vulture Specialist Group Member. Krishna.biologist@gmail.com )