![]() The third member of this cliff-side team is a Bombay Natural History Society biologist named Shanmugam Saravanan. Wesley is taking a busman's holiday from his job managing the New Zealand Alpine Club. "You'll be seeing that meal again."Ĭuthbert is a biologist with the United Kingdom's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It nudges the chick, opens its long bill and urps up supper. The bird banks hard and alights on the ledge. We see its full seven-foot wingspan, the tawny plumage on the adult's back rippling in the updraft, its darker wing feathers splayed at the tips. ![]() One of the nestling's enormous parents wheels into view. When a pungent, three-day-old diaper smell wafts up to us, we peer down, and there, on a ledge 30 feet below us, lies an eagle-size chick in a messy nest of twigs. These high niches are prime nesting habitat for long-billed vultures, but this year only a few of the great birds have returned to nest, and chicks are few and far between. In the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve of central India, this moment comes for us atop a 100-foot-high cliff etched with natural ledges and carved crenelations of an ancient Hindu fort built into the cliff's sandstone face. ![]() There is a moment during the capturing of baby vultures when the human nose can be considered an asset. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |