The ‘Human Swan’ is taking flight again – this time with vultures

A few weeks ago, along a ridge somewhere north of the South African city of Pretoria, Sacha Dench returned to the skies once more. The Dartmoor-based conservationist, nicknamed the “Human Swan” for once flying the 4,300 mile migration route of the Bewick’s swan across Russia and Europe, was flying as a passenger in a three-wheeled paramotor operated by a pilot to visit a colony of cape vultures.

Taking flight soon after sunrise, they ascended several hundreds of metres to where the huge birds, which have a wingspan exceeding 2m, were clustered along the ridge. “From take-off, I felt a slow return of a sense of joy,” the 50-year-old Dench recalls. “Being in the air with these other majestic flying creatures was pretty special.”

Vultures are the reason why Dench, a former UN ambassador for migratory birds, is airborne once more. For her new project, Flight of the Vultures, Dench is launching 10 expeditions to far-flung corners of the globe where vultures are now threatened with extinction to raise awareness of their plight. Her aim is to change the public perception of these much-maligned scavengers, which are not just vital to ecosystems but also protect human health and help arrest the decline of a bird which has suffered the most rapid collapse of any on record.

Dench is hoping to change the negative public perception of vultures. Until very recently, Dench never imagined that she might be flying with birds again. In September 2021, while attempting a world-first circumnavigation of mainland Britain in a battery-powered paramotor, she was involved in a tragic incident over the Scottish Highlands. Her colleague and close friend Dan Burton, who was flying in support, was killed, and Dench ended up plummeting 150ft to the ground.

She landed in a bog, breaking her ribs, jaw, sacrum and hip. Her lower legs, meanwhile, she describes “as good as detached”. So severe were her injuries that the initial prognosis was for a double amputation. It was only because of the physical nature of her work that surgeons agreed to try and keep her legs.

In total, Dench (who in her youth represented Great Britain at freediving) spent around six months in hospital in Scotland and Bristol, undergoing a series of gruelling operations. Although the mental impact of the crash proved equally debilitating. “The hardest thing after an accident like that and losing your best mate is you end up in a very black space in your head,” she says. “In the first weeks and months after, it felt like I had lost my soul. I genuinely didn’t have the ability to smile anymore.”

The support of family and friends, plus the efforts of health professionals to ensure she could walk again, eventually persuaded Dench to contemplate recovery. Her father would sit for hours by her bedside, and a cousin posted a brown paper bag filled with strong-smelling leaves to remind her of the world outside her sterile hospital room.

She was also put in contact with a prosthetics manufacturer in the US, which developed a prototype design to return limbless military veterans back into active service. After crowdfunding for the external prosthetics, known as Exosym and which cost £7,500 a piece, Dench was fitted with the carbon braces a year ago, enabling her to walk more freely.

Vultures have provided her other source of motivation. While previously raising awareness of the plight of Bewick’s swans and ospreys through her organisation Conservation Without Borders, Dench has long considered launching a project focused on the scavenging birds. Indeed, a former UN colleague who had received a terminal cancer diagnosis had previously urged her to “do something for the vultures”.

Over recent decades, vultures have been declining at catastrophic rates. During the 1990s, vulture populations on the Indian subcontinent collapsed by 99 per cent (the fastest drop of any bird species in recorded history). Meanwhile, in their other former stronghold in Africa, seven out of the 11 species found there are now on the verge of extinction.

As well as proving disastrous for natural ecosystems, this decline also has serious implications for human health with fears the absence of the birds, which act as clean-up crews by picking carcasses clean, will lead to a spike in outbreaks of diseases including plague, anthrax and rabies. According to one recently published peer-reviewed study in the American Economic Association journal, the loss of India’s vultures and the subsequent rise in deadly bacteria has led to more than half a million excess deaths over a five-year period.

Each of the 10 locations highlighted by Flight of the Vultures is intended to raise awareness of the factors driving their decline. Poisoning is the main issue, with the birds unwittingly feeding on carcasses that have been laced with lethal toxins. Other pesticides and agricultural chemicals also prove harmful to the birds, in particular, diclofenac (a cheap painkiller used to treat cattle, which was banned across parts of South Asia in 2006 but remains in circulation across the world). Elsewhere, vultures are poached for use in local belief-based medicine and are vulnerable to being ensnared by power lines and wind turbines.

Dench’s project already has some high-profile supporters including Joanna Lumley and, she tells me, her Absolutely Fabulous co-star Jennifer Saunders. In fact, she points out, the entertainment industry has a lot to answer for when it comes to feeding negative public perception of the birds. The vultures in Disney’s Snow White and The Jungle Book, for example, are, in turn malign and foolish. “They really need an image change,” she says. “If we loved them, people would be horrified at watching them disappear.”

Dench also hopes to highlight success stories of vulture conservation through the project – one of which is based in the unlikely location of an old sheep farm in Carmarthenshire, South Wales. We meet here at the home of the Horstmann Trust, which now has one of the largest populations of captive vultures in Europe and is breeding birds for release all over the globe.

The charity was launched in 2023 after the land and collection of birds were donated by Manfred Horstmann and Brett Sloman, who had together built up a private aviary of vultures. Today, the 110-acre site is run by couple, Adam Bloch and Holly Cale and is home to 76 birds, including 8 per cent of the world’s captive known populations of hooded vultures and 7 per cent of the world’s captive Egyptian vultures.

The Hostmann Trust uses these captive birds to breed offspring, which can be released into the wild to help restore populations. This year, they are hoping to send several Egyptian vultures to Bulgaria to help bolster the European population of the endangered bird.

Bloch, 52, says that Dench’s aim of transforming vulture public relations is urgently needed. “Vulture imagery is a massive problem,” he says. “We need people to love and want vultures as much as we do.”

The bird is also a fitting symbol for Dench’s return to the skies. When she first flew with vultures in Spain nearly a decade ago, she realised that they are a pilot’s “best friend in the sky” for their ability to pick out thermals and their willingness to coast alongside humans.

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Speaking of her recent South Africa flight, she says, “It was still so impressive to be close to such huge wonderful big-winged birds and just enough of a taste to tell myself I ought to find a way to get back there. It also confirmed the value of being up in the aircraft to see their habitat and the world from their point of view.”



Given the extent of her injuries, Dench is realistic about her future flying prospects. She admits that even with her prosthetics, she would be unable to do the running required to take off on a solo paramotor. She is currently considering taking a specialist course for disabled paragliders, which is based in France, and hopes to do more over the course of the vulture project.

Her recent flight was a considerable mental hurdle to overcome, but she stresses that as well as celebrating the natural world, her expeditions have always been driven by a sense of purpose. That is something the vultures are now providing.

“It’s not going to be easy but if we can save the vultures, we can save everything,” she says. “That’s worth trying for.”

Read more about Flight of the Vultures here