Protecting nature’s maligned caretakers

Published in 2010

“We’ve won so many battles, but are constantly facing threats on new fronts.” With these words Michel Terrasse, Rolex Award Laureate in 1984, sums up the reality of his efforts to reintroduce birds of prey to their natural environment. The French ornithologist and wildlife film-maker has just taken up the reins of the new Vulture Conservation Foundation (VCF).

The foundation was established in September 2009 in Spain. Its honorary president, Luc Hoffmann, is a WWF co-founder who has personally supported Michel Terrasse’s work since the late 1960s. The VCF is the result of the merger of the Black Vulture Conservation Foundation and the Foundation for the Conservation of the Bearded Vulture, and it plans to meld and pursue the activities of these two groups. This includes implementing the Action Plan against the Illegal Use of Poison in Europe, a programme launched in 1997 to detect, document and combat an unlawful practice that has ravaged much of the wildlife of southern Europe.

Vultures ingest contaminated bait, or are poisoned by feeding on carcasses of animals that died from eating bait. This is why the attempt to reintroduce the bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus) to Sardinia in 2008 failed: “The three young vultures we released were poisoned,” Terrasse recalls. “Not only are such losses regrettable from the point of view of biodiversity, they are extremely costly.”

The use of poison to eradicate species that were considered harmful had already contributed to the disappearance, in 1920, of the griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus) from the Grands Causses region in the southern Massif Central. After years of work, notably to convince the local people of the beneficial role played by these scavengers in the pastoral economy, Michel Terrasse and his brother Jean-François, in a world first, were able to reintroduce the species in 1981. Today, over 800 griffon vultures, including 220 pairs, clean the Grands Causses of livestock carcasses.

With the VCF, Michel Terrasse is now preparing to reintroduce the bearded vulture, again in the Grands Causses, from where it disappeared probably several centuries ago. One look at a map of these high, canyon-riddled limestone plateaux explains why. The Causses vulture lives halfway between the original Alpine population, reintroduced in 1986, and the indigenous Pyrenean vultures. The Grands Causses could become a link between the two groups, promoting exchanges and thereby enriching the genetic mix.

Other species closely observed by the VCF are the Egyptian vulture (Neophron percnopterus), the smallest of the four species of European vulture, and the black vulture (Aegypius monachus).

The Egyptian vulture has seen its numbers plummet in the Balkans in the past decade, as more have died along migratory routes as well as in their winter grounds, where the risk of poisoning is second only to that of being shot.

The black vulture, after a century-long absence and a reintroduction programme launched in 1992, is once again flying over the Causses and the southern Alps, a victory that Michel Terrasse describes as a source of satisfaction – but no reason for complacency: “Our field teams have to constantly justify their work to the population and the media, because vultures are once again being unjustly perceived as predators. The biggest problem is that people are getting used to living in an empty world.” A world that the VCF is striving to repopulate with wild species.

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