An endangered species of vulture has been bred in captivity for the first time cheering those trying to rescue the South Asian bird from the brink of extinction. Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said that the Oriental white-backed vulture chick hatched at a breeding center last week at pijore in Haryana.
Numbers of South Asia's Oriental white-backed, long-billed and slender-billed vultures have plummeted by more than 97 per cent in the last 15 years. Scientist say the decline is largely due to farmers dosing their cattle with diclofenac, a drug used to treat inflammation, poisoning the scavenging birds one step up the food chain. India banned the production and sale of diclofenac in May last year, but implementation of the ban has been slow.
India has also been successfully breeding in captivity the slender-billed vulture- another of the three threatened species- since 2005
(The Business Line,10th January 2007)
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