One bird.
Months of planning.
A species teetering on the edge of extinction.
And then… a single power line ended it all. ⚡
On June 28, 2026, a captive-bred, radio-tagged white-rumped vulture was electrocuted on the slopes of Ebbanad, overlooking the Sigur plateau in the Nilgiris.
Its death marks the failure of South India's first attempted reintroduction of this critically endangered bird.
This wasn't just any vulture.
Its species has crashed by over 99% across the Indian subcontinent since the 1990s.
From an estimated 50 million birds… to near-zero.
The villain back then? Diclofenac — a cheap painkiller given to cattle that poisoned every vulture that fed on the carcass.
Scientists later linked that collapse to the deaths of nearly half a million people in India, as rotting carcasses fueled disease.
That's how important these scavengers are.
This bird had already lived three lives before Sunday:
The hope was simple: let it find the wild flock. Let it belong.
The vulture refused to acclimatise.
It kept wandering — Gudalur, Kalhatty, Ebbanad.
Foresters caught it. Released it again into Sigur. It flew off again.
"We had captured the bird multiple times," said R. Kiruba Shankar, Field Director of MTR.
Then Sunday came. A power line. A spark.
And a multi-state, multi-agency conservation dream went silent.
Power lines have quietly become one of the biggest vulture killers in the region.
Conservationists are now pushing hard for:
S. Bharathidasan of Arulagam says it's overdue. The Forest Department now says it's on the table.
You can breed a species back from the brink in a cage.
But releasing it into a landscape stitched with high-voltage wires?
That's not rewilding. That's a gamble.
One bird died this weekend.
The real question is whether India fixes the sky before the next one takes off.
That's all for now!
