The drug that emptied the sky
Through the 1990s, vulture populations across South Asia fell off a cliff so steeply that ornithologists initially suspected a new disease. The Gyps vulture, the genus that includes the white-rumped, long-billed, and slender-billed species, had been among the most numerous large raptors on earth. Surveys conducted by the Bombay Natural History Society found that between 1992 and 2007, India's white-rumped vulture population declined by approximately 99.9 percent. The long-billed and slender-billed species fell by over 97 percent. These are not rounding errors. These are functional extinction numbers.
