Scavengers: Endgame

The vulture, sadly, is a bird with an image problem. Bald, unsexy, crouching over carrion, it is much harder to love than, say, the imperious, beautiful tiger. Yet we depend on the dying bird. Our lives remain tied to it. Quite literally so

- Mridula Ramesh

He soars, feeling the warm updraft of air cushion his outstretched wings, which stretch 7 ft from tip to tip, as he flies towards the sun.

In his youthful ebullience, he goes farther than he should. Too late, he realises this, as he feels the heat of the sun singe his feathers.

This is not the cautionary tale of Icarus. This is an Indian tale, with a different moral. Sampati sees his younger brother falter, and shouts at him to slow down, turn around, but his brother won't listen. Finally, with a powerful sweep of his wings, the great vulture surges ahead and shelters his brother. He feels the heat of the sun burn his feathers and tumbles towards Earth, wingless, powerless, comforted only by the thought that he saved his brother.

Sampati is a demigod, a vulture said to have been born not too far from where we stood, staring at a majestic cliff face in the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh.

Vultures rank among the world's largest flying birds. With a wingspan longer than a tall man, they often fly over 100 km in a day, searching for food. Nature's cleaning service, these scavengers can strip a carcass to the bone in hours. In India's Swachh Bharat campaign, they have not received their due credit. We always seem to undervalue Nature's services, don't we?

Sadly, India's vulture population has fallen from 40 million to about 30,000 over 30 years; the result of a kind of opioid epidemic.

Diclofenac, introduced in 1973, has become one of the world's most widely prescribed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs); a painkiller of choice, if you will. Generic versions entered the market in 1993, and veterinary versions entered India soon after. Farmers started administering it to ageing cattle to ease their pain. When those animals died, the drug lingered, and made its way into the vultures that fed on their carcasses.