Glob­al­ly, vul­tures are re­gard­ed as cru­cial to main­tain­ing the health of ecosys­tems but de­spite their im­por­tance, re­cent find­ings have un­earthed a wor­ry­ing de­vel­op­ment that is threat­en­ing the bird’s ex­is­tence. Ac­cord­ing to the di­rec­tor of the El So­cor­ro Cen­tre for Wildlife, Ri­car­do Meade, while the vul­ture elim­i­nates harm­ful sub­stances from the en­vi­ron­ment, their num­bers have been falling. “Vul­ture pop­u­la­tions are down about 90 per cent. We could be teth­er­ing on the brink of a dis­as­ter be­cause of what they do for the en­vi­ron­ment and their ab­sence from the en­vi­ron­ment will cre­ate a down­ward spi­ral, that will end up with us suf­fer­ing,” he ex­plained.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia on Thurs­day, less than a week af­ter the world recog­nised In­ter­na­tion­al Vul­ture Aware­ness Day, Meade not­ed that while there have been scat­tered re­ports of the birds be­ing killed due to poi­son­ing, the lo­cal pop­u­la­tion of the two main species re­main steady.

Meade main­tained that con­ser­va­tion of the scav­enger re­mains crit­i­cal.

“This is what makes them re­al­ly im­por­tant. Stom­ach con­tent is al­most ze­ro on the PH scale, it is right down there, al­most one ac­tu­al­ly so that is ex­treme­ly acidic. So al­most any­thing that goes in­to their stom­ach dies, so they’re like Clorox, they kill 99 per cent of house­hold germs or germs out­side there, bot­u­lism, an­thrax, lep­tospiro­sis, any­thing they eat goes in there and dies so it does not spread,” Meade said.

At the con­ser­va­tion’s Freeport es­tate, one vul­ture in par­tic­u­lar had stolen the show.

He is six-month-old Chase and over time has be­come more of a pet and friend to vol­un­teer Don­na Karim who has since chron­i­cled her in­ter­ac­tion with the “cor­beaux” on so­cial me­dia. This she hoped would elim­i­nate some of the stig­ma as­so­ci­at­ed with the vul­ture.

“He was brought in to us at just two weeks old and he was crit­i­cal­ly ill so we took care of him and then he kind of im­print­ed on me. Im­print­ing is what birds do in that who­ev­er starts see­ing about them, they start look­ing at them as the par­ent. So he ba­si­cal­ly looked at me as his par­ent. I would say you don’t have to like them, just re­spect them and the job that they do, it’s a very im­por­tant one.”

Both Karim and Meade ad­vo­cate for the pro­tec­tion of the birds, which are need­ed to keep the en­vi­ron­ment clean and free of con­ta­gious dis­eases.