Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The fate of the Gamla vultures

I had a post from last summer about dead vultures in the Gamla, a nature preserve in Israel. The Gamla at one time hosted the largest group of Griffon vultures in the world, but last summer, almost all of them mysteriously dropped dead. Turns out that there were ranchers who were doing battle with either each other or with the wolves. They fight wolves by laying out poisoned carcasses for them to eat. And they fight each other by poisoning each other's cattle, which in turn kill the vultures.

I learned all this at a restaurant called Suki Soup on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. I was at a DDD dinner, sitting next to an Israeli who happened to be the head of the forest rangers in the Golan.

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