Costs, Benefits, and Bearded Vultures

As a young zoo-lover, one of the most special memories of my childhood was a vacation I took about 20 years ago to the Mecca of American zoos – San Diego.  There, between the Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, SeaWorld, and Birch Aquarium, I saw thousands of animals, many of them species I had never seen before in my life.  Some of those species I later went on to work with as a keeper, and I saw them every day.  Others, I haven’t seen since.

Among those species was a bird that I’d read about long before and had always been entranced by – the lammergeier, also known as the bearded vulture.  This is a huge, shaggy raptor, once found in a sweeping arc from South Africa to Switzerland, Morocco to Mongolia, occupying desolate mountain ranges.  The birds are particularly famous for subsisting on bones, which they pick up in their talons and carry to great heights, then drop to shatter on the rocks below.  In my pre-Internet access days, I had no idea that I was going to see one in a towering aviary at the San Diego Zoo.  When I walked down the trail and suddenly spotted it, I felt like an animal which until then had only existed in my books was suddenly real.

Apart from that one brief visit, I’ve never seen a bearded vulture.  To the extent that I thought about it, I figured it would be something to look forward to if I were to take a zoo trip to Europe at some point.

Imagine my surprise last month when I was scrolling though Facebook and saw one starring back at me from a photo – and I learned that , for the first time in years, there was a bearded vulture state-side.

The World Bird Sanctuary, located in St. Louis, recently imported a bearded vulture to its facility, along with three smaller, rarer, but equally impressive Egyptian vultures.  The animal came from Kazakhstan, and is currently undergoing its mandatory quarantine period in New York before moving on to Missouri.

Part of me is so excited that I might get to see one again without booking a flight to Austria.  The other part of me?  Well, it’s a little skeptical.

I’ve coordinated an international transport before.  It’s extremely time consuming.  It’s also very expensive.  It certainly takes a toll on the animal, which has to go through a very stressful transport during which everything it knows is uprooted.  There’s a reason that we in the zoo community try to keep those down to a manageable level – why we aren’t swapping elephants and tigers with European or Asian zoos every other week.

This was really cool, and no doubt a major accomplishment.  I’m just not sure it was worth it in this case. Importing a single bird to be used as an educational ambassador doesn’t do too much for conservation – there’s no bearded vulture population in the states for this bird to add genetic diversity too.  It’s not going to dramatically alter the zoo visitor experience in the way that, say, the platypuses at San Diego will (which are also providing valuable research opportunities on keeping platypuses in American collections).

Now, it’s World Bird Sanctuary’s time and money, and they are allowed to do what they want with it.  I just think of the opportunities that might have been missed for vulture conservation with that sort of money – even if they had imported a vulture of a different species, such as a lappet-faced vulture or white-backed vulture, it would have been much more valuable.  Those are breeding programs already in place for endangered birds, which we could stand to build upon by growing them.  Throwing a single bearded vulture into the mix doesn’t achieve that.  This would have been like the San Diego Zoo sending a single California condor to a German zoo to serve as an education ambassador.  It would be really cool for those German zoo visitors who had never gotten to see a California condor before – but that’s all that it would have achieved.

There are so many animals that, even after a lifetime of visiting zoos, I've never seen that I would love to.  If the National Zoo announced that they were importing saiga, or the Dallas Zoo was importing Ethiopian wolves, or the Henry Doorly Zoo was importing indri, I'd be so excited.  At the same time, without enough animals to form a stable population, it's just a PR move, one that lets you claim that you have the "one and only."  Sometimes, that's justifiable - I still think that San Diego's platypus move isn't a bad idea, if it leads to the development of techniques which could possibly teach us how to establish a colony of platypuses in the US should things go downhill in Australia.  It was part of a carefully planned master project.  If every zoo just starts importing stuff just to be different, however, we may soon find out that none of our breeding programs are sustainable.

That being said, I’m totally still going to see that bird if I ever get the chance…