Help Find Vultures To Eat The Dead

Religious leaders in India are calling on an English bird expert to help them with a bizarre problem - a lack of vultures to eat their dead!

As part of a traditional Parsee burial ceremony,corpses are left outside for the huge birds to strip off the flesh.

It is believed the remains of the dead should not be allowed to contaminate the purity of the earth,fire or water.

Instead,bodies are taken to a religious centre,known as the "Tower of Silence",where flocks of Indian white-back vultures devour them.

It takes about 30 minutes for the scavengers to strip a body,completing the Parsee `cycle of life'.

But since the 1960s,numbers of the vultures have been plummeting and the population is now down to 25 per cent of the original figure.

Jemima Parry-Jones,from a nationally-recognised birds of prey centre,is among a number of world experts who have been invited to the summit in Delhi to discuss the problem.

She hopes to be able to help establish the cause of the decline before the Parsees,the majority of whom live in the Bombay area,are forced to consider changing their traditional ways.

"We are looking at the possibility of setting up a breeding programme" she said today."The problem is,there is no point setting up a captive breeding programme and releasing the birds into the wild if they are just going to die.

"We think they might be dying from a disease,perhaps being transferred by chickens."

She said vultures perform a very important role,not just in the macabre ceremony,but in the ecology as a whole.

"There is a slight risk that if we don't find out what has happened to the populations,whatever is killing them may spread" she added.