Indian Vulture

• Its collapse was the fastest documented in any bird: from tens of millions of individuals to a few thousand in little more than a decade, caused by a veterinary anti-inflammatory that gave them acute kidney failure.
• Its disappearance had enormous public health consequences in India: livestock carcasses left unconsumed by vultures fed an explosion of feral dogs, and several studies link that increase to tens of thousands of additional human deaths from rabies.
• The towers of silence of the Parsi community, where vultures traditionally consumed the dead, were left without birds and forced the rethinking of a rite more than a thousand years old.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)

Habitat and environment

Rock faces, ruins and large trees on the plains and hills of the Indian subcontinent

Sexual maturity

5 years

Gestation / incubation

50 days of incubation

Litter / clutch size

1 egg

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Gyps indicus

The pins mark the parks where its presence is documented.