Our vulture project in The Times

While conservationists are confronted by the demands of a resource-hungry economy, they can generally count on one thing working in their favour: people like animals. They think they’re cute. They’ll donate to save the creatures their children cuddle in teddy form. But when was the last time you saw a teddy vulture?

It is this loser of nature’s beauty pageant that Sacha Dench, an Australian biologist, has set out to save. “There’s this perception that they’re not particularly valuable or worth saving,” she says. “If you ask a company if they want their brand associated with saving them, they’ll suddenly say ‘maybe not’. But they need help more than pretty much anything else right now.”

Of the 22 vulture species worldwide, 14 are threatened with extinction. Their disappearance is having an unusually direct impact on humans. Without vultures around to eat it, carrion can infect waterways with diseases lethal to humans. One study published last year estimated that the 91-to-98 per cent decline of vultures in India had led to 500,000 human deaths. Vulture populations collapsed in the country because they were feasting on cows that had been treated with the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which is poisonous to the birds. The authorities banned the drug for veterinary use in 2006 but vultures are still dying from it. 

Diclofenac is just one of many threats to vultures that Dench will seek to highlight on a series of ten expeditions over the next two years, each taking her to a different part of the birds’ range, from North America, to Cambodia, to Africa. “We’ll be finding people who are going to extremes to save vultures,” she says.

In the Gambia she’ll speak with local conservationists who are trying to dispel beliefs about the magical properties of vultures’ body parts. “There’s a belief that wearing a vulture skull gives you powers to see into the future,” she says. In Spain she’ll highlight the threat of vultures being clobbered by wind turbines, and speak to technicians developing AI systems that switch turbines off as birds approach.

Her journeys will begin in July with a trip to the Manfred Horstmann Vulture Conservation Trust in south Wales, where vultures are being bred for release around the world.

Dench was first drawn to vultures while paragliding. “As a paraglider,” she says, “vultures are your best friends. They can see thermals from a huge distance away, so there’s a lot you can learn from them.”

It was as a paraglider that Dench embarked on her first mission to raise awareness about declining biodiversity. In 2016, in a feat for which the newspapers christened her the “human swan”, Dench flew a paramotor along the entire 4,000-mile migratory path of the Bewick’s swan, from the Russian tundra to the shores of Britain.

In the run-up to Cop26 in 2021, she attempted to circumnavigate Britain in an electric paramotor, stopping off to speak to people about the impact of climate change on the country. But that adventure ended in disaster. Above the Scottish highlands, she and her cameraman collided in mid air, killing him and severely injuring her.

Dench has since tentatively begun to paraglide again, and hopes to do so on her next expeditions, yet unlike her previous journeys paragliding will not be the modus operandi. “This would be my first real return to the air. It’s not guaranteed that I’ll want to be flying, but the work can happen without it as well.”

Dench acknowledges there’s a risk that her attempt to speak for the vultures might come off as merely bossing people in other countries around. But she’s confident she’ll be able to start some productive conversations. “When I did the flight of the swans, people thought I would not be able to speak to the hunters in the Arctic. In fact, I just went in with the attitude that I’m sure nobody wants to see a bird disappearing, they probably have no idea of the situation, I don’t know anything about these hunters and I’m going to spend time getting to know them. And I made a tonne of friends and allies. 

“By understanding the situation much better we could figure out who the allies are and see if they can come up with the solutions. I guess I’m not afraid of those tough conversations.”

Until next week,

Ben