Where Are the Vultures?

Susan McGrath wrote a terrific piece for the February Smithsonian about the dramatic disappearance of vultures, which once numbered in the tens of millions, from India and Pakistan. I read the story a while back but just recently stumbled on this interview with the author. Asked what Indians thought about losing their vultures, McGrath answers:

Actually, I have a funny story about that. When you picture this in your mind you probably picture a cow carcass with 30 dead vultures lying around, but it wasn't like that. No one ever found any dead vultures, there were simply less and less of them. It turns out that's because they're dark and hard to see, they die up in the tree branches and they stay there, scavengers get them, and it's really hot so they decompose quickly. But for a long time no one saw any dead vultures, so the when [biologist] Vibhu Prakash first started asking villagers, "Where are the vultures?" the villagers told him, "The Americans are stealing them, they're vacuuming them out of the sky."

That's funny, but the story is really quite tragic. For the real cause behind the vultures' precipitous decline, read The Vanishing.