Maharashtra | September 10, 2026
India’s long battle to bring its critically endangered vultures back from the brink is beginning to produce encouraging results, with Melghat and Pench Tiger Reserves in Maharashtra emerging as the country’s most successful sites for releasing captive-bred vultures into the wild.
According to the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), vultures released in the two tiger reserves have recorded survival rates of up to 78 per cent, providing important evidence that birds raised in conservation breeding centres can successfully adjust to life in the wild.
The achievement comes as India’s vulture conservation breeding programme completes 25 years, during which more than 800 vultures belonging to three species have been bred. But breeding birds in captivity is only part of the challenge. The crucial test is whether those birds can survive, disperse and eventually reproduce after release.
Pench records 78% survival
Under a partnership between BNHS and the Maharashtra Forest Department, 14 vultures—nine White-rumped Vultures and five Long-billed Vultures—were released at Pench in December 2025.
Nine months later, the group had recorded a 78 per cent survival rate, the highest reported from the current captive-bred vulture reintroduction programme.
There has been another encouraging development at Pench.
Wild vulture nesting success in the East Pench range increased from 89 per cent during the 2024 season to 100 per cent in 2025, with all active nests successfully producing fledglings during the 2025–26 breeding cycle.
This is significant because the ultimate objective is not merely to keep released birds alive, but to rebuild self-sustaining wild populations.
Melghat achieves 60% survival
Melghat Tiger Reserve is producing similarly promising results.
A group of 15 captive-bred Long-billed Vultures was soft-released there in January 2026. Eight months later, nine were surviving successfully in the wild, representing a 60 per cent survival rate.
Before release, the birds had been allowed to acclimatise in a specially constructed aviary. They were also fitted with tracking devices, enabling conservationists to follow their movements after they entered the wild.
The results have exceeded simply keeping the birds within the reserve.
Some have embarked on extraordinary journeys across central and western India.
One vulture travelled nearly 5,000 km
Satellite tracking has revealed the remarkable ability of the released birds to explore huge landscapes.
A female Long-billed Vulture identified as X67 travelled 4,911 km across Madhya Pradesh, while another bird, X65, covered 4,257 km through Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
Such movements are particularly important for conservationists.
They demonstrate that captive-bred vultures can develop natural-ranging behaviour after release rather than remaining dependent on the immediate surroundings of their acclimatisation aviaries.
The movements also underline why vulture conservation cannot be confined to individual protected areas. Once released, these birds can travel across state boundaries and through landscapes containing farms, villages and livestock.
Why tiger reserves may be ideal vulture recovery landscapes
The Maharashtra results are also supporting an important change in India’s vulture-release strategy.
BNHS increasingly turned towards tiger reserves as release locations, particularly landscapes where village relocation and tiger conservation have helped create relatively undisturbed grasslands and meadows.
These areas can provide vultures with wild animal carcasses while reducing their dependence on carcasses of domestic livestock that may contain toxic veterinary drugs.
That connection between tiger conservation and vulture recovery is particularly interesting.
A landscape protected primarily for a large predator can simultaneously provide safer habitat for one of India’s most threatened groups of birds.
Diclofenac triggered a catastrophic collapse
The present recovery effort follows one of the most dramatic wildlife declines ever documented in India.
Vulture populations crashed after birds fed on carcasses of livestock that had been treated with certain veterinary non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.
Diclofenac became particularly notorious. Even small residues of the drug in livestock carcasses could cause fatal kidney failure in vultures.
Other veterinary NSAIDs have subsequently also become conservation concerns.
BNHS says Maharashtra’s vulture population had declined dramatically by 2004, with several landscapes eventually losing their resident populations.
The ecological consequences were serious because vultures perform a service few other animals can match: they can rapidly dispose of large animal carcasses.
25 years of breeding begins to pay off
India responded to the crisis with one of the world’s most ambitious conservation-breeding programmes for vultures.
The Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre at Pinjore in Haryana became a major centre for breeding threatened vultures. The birds now being released in Maharashtra were bred there before being transported to their eventual release landscapes.
BNHS began releasing captive-bred vultures in 2020.
Over the subsequent six years, around 134 birds have been released in partnership with the governments of Haryana, West Bengal, Assam and Maharashtra, with permissions from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and Central Zoo Authority.
The Maharashtra experiment is now providing some of the strongest evidence yet that this enormous investment in captive breeding can translate into actual restoration of wild populations.
More than 100 awareness programmes
Successful releases alone cannot guarantee the vultures’ future.
If released birds encounter carcasses contaminated by toxic veterinary drugs, decades of conservation work could quickly be undermined.
BNHS and the Maharashtra Forest Department are therefore simultaneously trying to reduce threats on the ground.
More than 100 targeted awareness programmes have been conducted for forest personnel, local communities, gaushala managers and tourism guides, focusing on issues including safer carcass disposal and threats posed by harmful veterinary drugs.
This is particularly important because satellite-tracked vultures do not recognise protected-area boundaries. A bird released in Melghat can eventually feed on a livestock carcass hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away.
Wild vultures are returning too
There are other encouraging signs.
After the Melghat releases, a wild Himalayan Griffon was recorded feeding alongside the released vultures. An Eurasian Griffon Vulture was also subsequently sighted in Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve.
These observations do not by themselves prove population recovery, but they suggest that restored landscapes and feeding opportunities may attract wild vultures as well as support captive-bred birds.
A promising beginning—not the end of the recovery
The figures from Maharashtra are impressive, but conservationists will need years of monitoring before declaring the recovery secure.
Survival after release is the first major hurdle. The next tests will be whether the birds establish stable ranges, find mates, breed successfully and produce new generations capable of surviving without human intervention.
Kishor Rithe, Director of BNHS, described the pre-release aviaries at Melghat and Pench as the most successful release aviaries in the programme so far.
That makes the Maharashtra experiment important far beyond the state’s boundaries.
India’s vulture crisis was once considered an example of how extraordinarily quickly a common group of birds could be pushed towards extinction.
Twenty-five years later, Melghat and Pench are beginning to demonstrate the opposite possibility—that sustained science, captive breeding, habitat protection and removal of threats can give even severely depleted species a route back to the wild.
Source credit: Mid-day, September 10, 2026, with additional information from the Bombay Natural History Society and PTI.
Leave a Reply