06/09/2026
What would happen if your city stopped collecting garbage—not for a week, not for a month, but for a whole year?
That is, in a sense, what our wild ecosystems would face without vultures.
On World Vultures Day, I’m taken back to 1996, when I began researching vultures in the Maasai Mara. I later joined forces with fellow ornithologists Munir Virani and Simon Thomset, and our work eventually resulted in two scientific papers. Our work was aired briefly on the BBC during the presentation of the the Big Cat Live program.
One of the most fascinating parts of the research was satellite-tracking vultures. One Rüppell’s Griffon Vulture we tagged in the Mara travelled through the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, around Kilimanjaro, through Mkomazi and the Tsavos, across Kenya into Sudan and Ethiopia, over Uganda, and eventually back to the Serengeti.
It showed us just how vast their world is—and why their conservation must cross borders.
Vultures may not be everyone’s favourite birds, but they are nature’s essential clean-up crew. By rapidly consuming carcasses, they help prevent the build-up of disease and keep ecosystems healthy.
But vultures are under pressure from poisoning, habitat loss, declining food sources and other human-related threats.
So protecting vultures means stopping indiscriminate poisoning, safeguarding their breeding and roosting sites, maintaining healthy wildlife populations, and ensuring that conservation efforts extend across the countries they travel through.
They may not be beautiful to everyone, but they are indispensable to all of us.
This World Vultures Day, let’s protect the cleaners that keep our wild places healthy.
