Critically Endangered
White-rumped Vulture
Gyps bengalensis
The white-rumped vulture is an Old World vulture native to South and Southeast Asia.
Appearance
The white-rumped vulture is the smallest of the Gyps vultures, but is still a very large bird. It has an unfeathered head and neck, very broad wings, and short tail feathers. The adult's whitish back, rump, and underwing coverts contrast with the otherwise dark plumage.
It weighs 3.5–7.5 kg (7.7–16.5 lb), measures 75–93 cm (30–37 in) in length, and has a wingspan of 1.92–2.6 m (6.3–8.5 ft).
Range and habitat
The white-rumped vulture is an Old World vulture native to South and Southeast Asia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
This vulture builds its nest on tall trees often near human habitations in northern and central India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and southeast Asia, laying one egg. Allan Octavian Hume observed "hundreds of nests" and noted that white-rumped vultures used to nest on large trees near habitations even when there were convenient cliffs in the vicinity.
Several pairs nest in the vicinity of each other and isolated nests tend to be those of younger birds. Hatchlings were seen from the first to the second week of January.Solitary nests are not used regularly and are sometimes taken over by the red-headed vulture and large owls such as Bubo coromandus.
In crisis
It has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2000, as the population severely declined. White-rumped vultures are threatened by diclofenac poisoning, that kills them by causing kidney failure. As of 2021, the global population put the number under 6,000 mature individuals.
In comparison, during the 1980s, the global population was estimated at several million individuals, and it was thought to be "the most abundant large bird of prey in the world". Currently, only the Cambodia and Burma populations are thought to be viable though those populations are still very small (low hundreds).
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
White-rumped Vulture is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on White-rumped Vulture, Wikidata item Q327118. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
