Status and Conservation
The Cinereous Vulture has declined over most of its range in the last 200 years in part due to poisoning by eating poisoned bait put out to kill dogs and other predators, and to higher hygiene standards reducing the amount of available carrion; it is currently listed as Near Threatened. Vultures of all species, although not the target of poisoning operations, may be shot on sight by locals. Trapping and hunting of Cinereous Vultures is particularly prevalent in China and Russia. Perhaps an even greater threat to this desolation-loving species is development and habitat destruction. Nests, often fairly low in the main fork of a tree, are relatively easy to access and thus have been historically compromised by egg and firewood collectors regularly. The decline has been the greatest in the western half of the range, with extinction in many European countries (France, Italy, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Albania, Moldovia, Romania) and its entire breeding range in northwest Africa (Morocco and Algeria). They no also longer nest in Israel. More recently, protection and deliberate feeding schemes have allowed some local recoveries in numbers, particularly in Spain, where numbers increased to about 1,000 pairs by 1992 after an earlier decline to 200 pairs in 1970. This colony have now spread its breeding grounds to Portugal ref 7. Elsewhere in Europe, very small but increasing numbers breed in Bulgaria and Greece, and a re-introduction scheme is under way in France. Trends in the small populations in Ukraine (Crimea) and European Russia, and in Asian populations, are not well recorded. In the former USSR, it is still threatened by illegal capture for zoos, and in Tibet by rodenticides. It is a regular winter visitor around the coastal areas of Pakistan in small numbers. As of the turn of the 21st century, the worldwide population of Cinereous Vultures is estimated at 4500-5000 individuals.
Read more about this topic: Cinereous Vulture
Famous quotes containing the words status and/or conservation:
“Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly are—knowing because I am one of them—I am still amazed at how one need only say “I work” to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. “I work” has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)