A falconry centre in mid Wales hopes to breed life-saving rare African hooded vultures to help save them from extinction.
Hooded vultures, like other vulture species across Africa and Asia, are critically endangered, with fewer than 150,000 in the wild.
In India, a decline in vultures is believed to have contributed to the deaths of half a million people because they clear up the carcasses of dead animals, helping stop the spread of disease.
“It’s my life’s work,” said Luce Green, of Falconry Experience Wales. “I like to think of it as love into action.”
The latest assessment of African hooded vultures in 2021 showed numbers of mature adults had dropped to 131,000, and were continuing to fall.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, they are considered critically endangered.
Poisoning is one of the main threats, with poachers fearing circling vultures will give away their location. Another problem is the use of vulture parts in traditional medicine.
Hope for their survival partly rests with people like Ms Green and her partner Barry MacDonald who run Falconry Experience Wales in Newtown, Powys, and have devoted decades to studying and caring for them.
“We are losing them at such rapid rates,” she said.
The centre has introduced its hand-reared male, called Togo, to a female called Hope. If they are successful, the pair would expect to have just one chick at a time.
“There are only 200 hooded vultures in a human-based environment and the race is on. It’s a fine line of what’s needed to actually save them,” said Ms Green.
The ambition is that any chicks may eventually become part of a release programme, but, for now, it is more a case of adding to the population here.
“We can’t get into that environment to put birds back because it’s not safe for them, so we have to manage the populations of the hooded vultures,” Ms Green said.
Breeding vultures is vital, according to Campbell Murn, head of conservation research and education at the Hawk Conservancy Trust and lecturer at the University of Reading.
“It’s super important to breed from these birds and maintain what we call a safety net population,” he said.
He added vultures were like the “canary in the coal mine”.
“If your vultures are dying and disappearing then you’ve really got some problems,” he explained.
“They’re not going to win a beauty contest, that’s for sure, but we should care for vultures because they’re amazing. They form these really strong pair bonds, they’re dedicated parents, they’re fastidiously clean.
“But of course they’re also really important in terms of environmental and ecological services that they provide. Some people call them nature’s dustbin collectors, they’re really good indicators of what’s happening in the ecosystems where they live.
“So if that ecosystem’s in poor health, those species that live at this part of the food chain, they’re also going to suffer poor health.”
In the 1990s, the unintentional decimation of the vulture populations in India led to an increased awareness of their role in human health.
It was estimated their loss had led to half a million deaths over five years due to the spread of disease and bacteria the vultures would have removed from the environment.
Adam Bloch and Holly Cale, who run the The Horstmann Trust vulture conservation charity based in Carmarthenshire, were involved in efforts to stop the decline in Asia.
“They are doing better in some regions,” said Ms Cale, “but there’s a long way to go”.
They run the European Endangered Species Programme for hooded vultures and provide support to individual breeding programmes like that being attempted in Newtown.
“We are the fall-back,” said Mr Bloch.
“The work we are doing, and zoos around Europe are doing, is really to be that lifeboat, to be that ark population.”
At Falconry Experience Wales, there is also hope that captive birds like Vinnie can help another species – the white-backed vulture.
But, as yet, he has no mate.
“With the white-back vultures, globally there are only 270,000 of those left. In South Africa there’s only just over 7,000. They are declining at an alarming rate,” said Ms Green.
Hooded vultures and the white-backed vultures are, according to Mr Bloch, the species most at risk currently.
“They are like the Ford Escort of the vulture world in the sense that everybody just took them for granted, they were so common nobody really worried about them,” he said.
Falconry Experience Wales recently bought GPS trackers to be attached to four hooded vultures in West Africa, so that researchers can monitor their movements for up to five years.
They are also raising funds for poison response action kits, to help save affected birds.
But, while persecution in their native lands persists, the hope is that rearing even the smallest number of chicks in Wales could help save them from extinction.
