LiVE · Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction: An Ethnographic Study of Avian Conservation in Changing European Landscapes

Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction: An Ethnographic Study of Avian Conservation in Changing European Landscapes

The project Living with Vultures in the Sixth Extinction investigated how the global phenomena of accelerating species loss and corresponding wildlife management unfold within specific historical and cultural contexts. This study of vulture conservation takes place in a time of rapid global vulture decline. In India, a country where the carrion eating birds were once abundant, 95% of vulture populations have vanished in the past decades and similar catastrophic trends are visible across their South-East Asian and African distribution ranges. In this context Europe has become the last stronghold of these large scavengers that have come to depend on ongoing conservation initiatives, using management techniques such as captive breeding, reintroduction, translocation, monitoring, rehabilitation and strategically placed feeding stations to avoid deaths through direct or indirect poisoning. These conservation initiatives, in turn, depend on collaboration with local rural communities, especially farmers, herders and hunters, who are directly affected by – and at times in opposition to – vulture management and release. Using participatory and qualitative methods the project involved conversations and collaborations with conservation practitioners and local stakeholders in the field, to explore the challenges and possibilities of human-vulture coexistence. The project’s overall objective was to provide the first historically informed ethnography on contemporary vulture conservation in changing European landscapes. Using an interdisciplinary, ethnographic approach, the project produced local perspectives allowing for comparative analysis of the dynamic interface of human-vulture coexistence. Integrating findings from conservation science and biology, analytical emphasis has been placed on highlighting the co-constitution of social and biological processes, rather than their separation into distinctive domains. The project was guided by four sub-objectives: 1) To trace the trajectories of human-vulture coexistence in Europe, including recent histories of vulture extinctions/reintroductions and related changes in agro-environmental policies, rural livelihoods and conservation science. 2) To investigate and compare contemporary vulture conservation practices including captive breeding, reintroduction and monitoring in Europe, 3) To develop and experiment with more-than-human ethnography, exploring how the ‘biosocial’ agency of nonhuman beings maybe better addressed and represented in social science and humanist analysis. 4) To explore how an interdisciplinary framework grounded in social and cultural analysis can be made productive for actively contributing to sustainable wildlife management through engaging and collaborating with conservation scientists and practitioners in the field. Investigating the challenges and possibilities of vulture conservation from a social and cultural perspective, helps to understand one of the most fundamental challenges our society is facing, namely how to coexist with wildlife in multi-use landscapes that are increasingly dominated, and fractured by human projects (such as green energy infrastructures, tourism and recreational interest, and industrial agriculture).

Data: CORDIS, © European Union