Vultures: Beauty in the Beast Natural World

MUSIC: "Feast of the Mau Mau" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Vultures.

The most maligned of the world's birds.

The undertakers.

The cleaners.

# Cut the fat off the back of a baboon... #

Able to strip a carcass in minutes.

These birds have got to be tough and aggressive to

survive in one of the most savage environments on Earth.

# To the feast with the beast of the Mau Maus

# They make wine from the spine of a bulldog... #

But there's more to these birds than meets the eye.

And I want to prove it.

I think they're charismatic...

..intelligent...

..even beautiful.

Maybe we've got them all wrong.

The plains of East Africa.

It's here, on these vast grasslands, where predators

and prey play out their life and death struggles.

And it's here where vultures thrive...

..profiting from the death of others.

Vultures are one of the few animals known to rely

solely on carcasses of the dead for food.

It's a niche existence, but one suited to this savage paradise.

'I've been filming wildlife on the African plains for 20 years.

'Nowhere on Earth can match it for its drama.'

But vultures are a family of birds normally overlooked.

They're creatures to film when you're killing time...

..waiting for something more glamorous to show up.

I've always had a sort of morbid fascination for them.

There are 23 species of vulture worldwide, but I've come to

take a closer look at East African vultures to prove

that beneath that ugly facade lurks a creature as fascinating

and beautiful as any other.

You might have to bear with me on this one!

The Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

'It's February and the plains are empty.

'Finding vultures is proving to be difficult.'

It's the end of the dry season and although there are a few

animals out on the plains, there clearly aren't enough of them dying!

I assumed the plains would be heaving with vultures,

but it's a few days before I find any.

And when I do track them down, they seem very hungry.

I don't know how anyone's getting any eating done because every

time anyone gets their head and neck into the carcass to actually get

some meat, someone else comes along and just batters them from behind.

And they all just end up fighting the whole time.

And the most you see them eating fills eight, ten seconds.

They really are the most repulsive, disgusting,

ugly, vicious, ghoulish-sounding...

..antiheroes, which is probably why I love them so much.

The problem is I've got no idea what's happening here.

It's just a mass of angry birds fighting over a carcass.

I know it must be more complex than that. Life always is!

Do you want some food? Food!

'Simon Thomsett - world vulture expert and nanny.'

-What a dude!

-Come on. Look.

# Food, glorious food! #

Come on. See, you can see how big he is.

'Simon rescued this Ruppell's Griffon vulture after an eagle tried

'to kill it.

'If anyone can let me into the secrets of vultures, it's him

'and his friend.'

So, do I pick a piece up?

Yup.

-And oops!

-You're supposed to eat this bit, not me.

Well, you can see that it's pretty useless at eating on its own.

Cos it's just going to pull it around, isn't it?

Yeah. It needs to have a heavy body behind it, something that you can...

-Yeah, so put... Hold it down really hard, like this.

-Right.

And then... And then it can...

Otherwise it's just going to pull it... Pull it like that

and not get anything off it.

-So now you're...

-Turn it over.

-You're being a heavy mammal.

-Right.

And now it can use that bill to good effect by pulling back.

So efficient, isn't it? Look at that!

-Now, it couldn't eat that, see?

-Why not?

-Ooh!

-So shall I...?

-Why couldn't it eat it?

-Cos it wants to eat little tiny pieces of it.

-Right. So, if I hold it and let it...

-Yeah.

-And the other thing is try to cover the food like this, OK?

-Right.

It'll actually eat out of the middle of your hand.

So, it'll go underneath?

-Yes, and tuck in underneath and put its head in.

-The power is amazing!

You really don't appreciate the power and the efficiency of it

when you... When you watch them on a kill, do you?

Ow! Not me!

HE LAUGHS

'I can't imagine a tool more perfectly

'designed for stripping meat off a bone than this vulture's beak

'when combined with its strong neck and powerful tongue.'

That's so delicate, isn't it?

Are you looking at yourself in the lens?

You are, aren't you?

What do you think? Have you seen yourself lately?

Well, you're looking pretty good. Have you given him a name?

-Yeah, he's called Gollum.

-That's just so unfair.

THEY LAUGH

You really have bought into the whole stereotype.

'Obviously, I fall in love with Gollum straight away. Who wouldn't?

'He has charisma and, for a bird, he seems full of character

'and intelligence.

'He's also surprisingly clean, and despite trying to bite me,

'very well-behaved.'

Try and clean his bill for him.

Just grab his head and just sort of rub your hands up and down his bill.

He really appreciates it.

He don't want to play with me. He doesn't know me.

'Gollum's one of the only captive Ruppell's vultures in Africa.'

Very good!

'And Simon hopes to release him one day.'

You goofy bird!

'Understanding how Gollum eats is fascinating.'

It's just something to clean your bill on, hey?

'But I want to see vultures feeding in the wild.

'And right now is the perfect time.'

The long-awaited rains have finally come to the southern Serengeti.

Too late for some.

LION ROARS

Rain is as important to the vultures as it is to any animal here...

..because following the rains are the herds.

The great wildebeest migration is just a few days away

and everyone's waiting for it.

It won't be long before this place becomes vulture

heaven as they fly in from all over East Africa, so it's the perfect

time for me to really get to know them and see them at their best.

'Simon wants to show me that there's a lot more going on

'when vultures are feeding than meets the eye.

'So we've come out to the Serengeti in search of carcasses.'

-It's last night, isn't it?

-Must have been.

-You see the way that it's all been cut right through here?

-Yeah.

Incisors or something. This, for vultures?

Honestly, this is the best thing ever. Nice and fresh.

And they do like fresh meat.

How long would they take to strip something like this down to

-basically skin and bone?

-Well, about 100 vultures?

-Take them about 20 minutes.

-Really?

-Each one eating about 500 grams, a kilogram.

-20 minutes?

-20 minutes.

That's incredible, isn't it?

They just come in. Choo! Can clean this thing up within minutes.

-You see all these white lesions here?

-Yeah.

They're going all the way, spread throughout the whole of the lungs, everywhere, really.

It looks to me like it might have bovine TB.

Whatever it is, it's certainly diseased.

So, if that's bovine TB, it's basically very contagious to

other animals that could then pick that up and spread it?

Certainly, especially to other wildebeests. So, yeah.

So, what you want really is a cleaning crew to come in

-and completely clean it and get rid of all that disease, don't you?

-Yup.

And guess who that's going to be?

OK, let's get these cameras in it. When I say in it, I mean in it.

All right, you go!

'I want Simon to explain exactly what's going on

'when vultures turn up and fight over this carcass.

'So, in order to dissect the action on the obliging wildebeest, we rig

'it with cameras, which we can then watch on a monitor back in the car.

'Simon then insists we get well back as the vultures will be

'nervous of us.

'But it's not long before their keen eyes spot the kill.'

How far would they be able to spot a kill like this from?

Wouldn't be surprised if they can see at least 20 kilometres, you know,

especially other vultures going in.

These things really are amazingly cautious.

They come in, a few of them send out a couple of scouts beforehand.

They go in and have a look. Sometimes they just fly over,

sit in the trees, and a long distance away.

Then they all start massing around and basically, they're sort

of pulling straws, you know, who's going to be the first one to go in.

And it's usually the less cautious, you know, juveniles,

who really don't know what's up and they just go in there first.

And then, if she doesn't get harmed, all the other adults

and other species come in.

This is sort of the typical idea of what most people

have about the African savanna, you know, predator kills,

and then all the vultures come piling in. But no, they're very cautious.

They know, as we do, that thing was killed by a carnivore,

so they're not going to come in in a hurry.

Simon, I've got a vulture on the ground.

'I'm amazed how cautious the vultures are.'

And they're coming right... No, they're on the carcass.

-They're feeding straight away.

-Yeah, they're now... Ice has been broken.

Everybody's just going to pile in. So it's every man for himself now.

'Armed with cameras on the ground and a long lens in the car,

'Simon and I can get a really good look at the action.'

To me, this looks like complete chaos.

Everyone fighting over the... the food,

actually reminds me of Sunday lunch when I was a kid.

But is there any order to this?

If you were to take a photograph from directly above, you'd see

the carcass in the middle, the dominant vultures immediately

eating it, the less dominant vultures around the outside.

Marabou storks, hooded vultures, in a sort of a growing ring.

So it looks like chaos right now, but there is some order.

And you can see when they really are getting very angry, they stretch

out their necks and they just make that horrible hissing roar.

And they're just bashing into one another. They're real thugs,

aren't they?

They have incredibly strong necks. So when you see them

actually biting one another, you think they're doing terrible damage.

But their necks are a bit like pythons and snakes.

They have such incredibly strong necks.

They can pull about 20kg, 40-pound pull,

straight pull with just the muscles of their neck.

'So vultures might be ugly to us,

'but they're actually beautifully designed to do what they do.

'They have long necks to reach right up inside the carcass, which,

'critically, have few feathers

'so they don't get dirty and store bacteria.

'They've got strong hooked beaks for ripping flesh

'and a powerful tongue with backward-facing spines.

'And listening to Simon, I realise there does seem to be some

'order in this chaos -

'a hierarchy decided by age, bluff and species.

'There's not just one species of vulture here.'

-What's this vulture here, then?

-That one's a... They're both white-backs.

White-backs have the black bill, slightly smaller.

That one's the other one.

The Ruppell's - a totally different skull shape.

It has an ivory-coloured bill.

Adults have that... that pale yellow eye.

White-backs have a dark eye all the time.

'And then another vulture turns up - a Lappet-faced vulture.

'He looks bigger than the others and a little more handsome,

'if I dare say.'

I love that strut, that attitude they've got!

Look at that guy! A stunning-looking creature.

And he's just piling in there, saying, "I'm the man!"

'This guy is clearly the boss and the other vultures know it,

'backing off, giving him the space he needs to feed.'

He is tearing away at the edges of the scapula here,

tearing off the sinew.

He's not eating any of the raw meat.

He's eating these tiny little stringy bits of tendon, isn't he?

There's all that meat there.

You know, this film really is very valuable

because we can see precisely what he's eating.

You wouldn't think that that is going to sustain a huge vulture.

'So each vulture species has a niche.

'The Lappet-faced eats the tendons and visceral tissue.

'The Ruppell's dominate the best meat on the carcass.

'And the smaller white-backed vultures get what they can.

'Within just half an hour, they've cleaned up the disease-ridden

'wildebeest.

'Their stomachs are full and they've stored more

'meat in their bulging crops, ready to digest later.

'Some are now so stuffed that they struggle to fly.

'Others, however, have chicks to feed

'and head off on a long journey back to the nest.

'And that's exactly where we're going next.

'Simon tells me that vultures make very dedicated parents.

'So we head for their nest sites

'across the border from Tanzania into Kenya en route to Lake Kwenia.

'This hidden wildlife oasis on the edge of the Rift Valley is

'criss-crossed with high cliffs -

'perfect nesting sites for Ruppell's vultures.

'Ruppell's vultures don't just nest anywhere.

'They're very sensitive to disturbance and very picky about

'where they'll lay their eggs, so finding a nest to film isn't easy.'

Ah, there's a few vultures, Simon.

-It's pretty good, isn't it?

-Look at that!

Wow! It's nice to be in their world, isn't it, on their level?

Yeah, and this is a totally different experience from out on the open.

Look at this guy! He's just coming right in to have a look.

You have a huge amount coming straight over your head,

over this way.

Wow!

That's incredible.

Wow!

-That's a lot of vultures, isn't it?

-It's looking good today, isn't it?

-100 or so?

-Eh? 100?

-What do you reckon?

-Looks like it could be.

Well, very few people in the world get to see this kind of thing.

At this level.

That's pretty stunning.

'Simon's keen to show me an old nest, which is

'apparently made of a rather unusual material.'

So, there you go.

What, this is...? This is a nest?

This is a solid lump of vulture guano.

-That's amazing!

-That's vulture poo over hundreds of years.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-It's just incredible.

-Who knows, it could be thousands of years old.

I mean, this is a very dry environment, there's no...

hardly any rain here.

Something as thick as this must have been built up very slowly.

Really quite disgusting, at the same time, that I'm rubbing

and tapping what is essentially a massive great pile of poo!

-And you're sitting in it!

-I'm sitting in it!

THEY LAUGH

Simon and I are after an active nest though,

one preferably with a decent sized chick in it.

I like those guys there. That's nice hard, solid rock there.

-The ones out on the right?

-Yeah.

-OK.

-Yeah, we'll go for those ones.

-OK.

Early the next morning, Simon

descends the face to find a good nest and install a camera.

Hello, buddy, hi.

Oh, very cute.

The chick sits still,

pretending it's not there, hoping Simon won't see him.

Back up top I can monitor what the camera is seeing on my laptop.

Yeah, that's it, that's spot on.

Which means we can watch the birds without disturbing them.

Have a look at this.

-Ah.

-Has anyone ever filmed vultures here before?

No, never before. Not here in Kwenia.

In fact, the whole species,

very little has been done like this.

That's actually a pretty big chick, isn't it?

-How old do you reckon it is?

-It's deceptive

cos it... I mean, physically it's very big

but it's only about, I think about 45 to 60 days old.

It has, at least, another month or so to go.

Right. I suppose an animal that big needs,

certainly a chick, it's going to need a lot of food, isn't it?

He needs at least a kilo, maybe a bit more, a day.

-A kilo?

-A kilo of food.

So, Mum and Dad are coming back feeding him a soup of, you know,

nutritious guts and livers and all...

A kilo of that a day!

But Simon and I are concerned. We haven't seen either of

the parents visiting the nest.

Back in the southern Serengeti and the wildebeest have finally arrived.

1.4 million of them!

Around 500,000 tons of fresh meat.

And when they arrive, they calve.

No other animal is as important to the vultures here as the wildebeest.

Vultures mainly eat the bodies of animals that have died naturally,

of old age or starvation and it's the other scavengers

and predators that benefit from vultures,

not the other way round.

Hyenas use vultures like their eyes in the sky.

Where they circle may well be food.

Vultures and hyenas rely on each other

but their relationship is a fractious one.

Without hyenas, the vultures can't break through the

tough hide of the wildebeest,

and are only able to eat it through the nose, mouth and anus.

Competition for these openings becomes intense

and all the fighting means that few vultures actually get to feed.

So the vultures need the hyenas with their powerful jaws

to butcher the carcass and provide access to the meat inside.

The problem then is

that the hyenas want to eat it all themselves.

All the vultures can do is watch.

Some vultures do build up the courage to creep in closer

but hyenas will kill them, given the opportunity.

But pestering is something vultures are very good at.

Where vultures and hyenas gather,

black-backed jackals are sure to follow.

Jackals are consummate thieves and rely not on size and strength

but bravery and speed to get past the hyenas.

If you want to eat at the carcass, you've got to have guts.

The problem for the jackal, though, is he's actually getting a little

too big for his boots...and someone needs to show him who's boss.

Weighing in at ten kilograms, with a wingspan of nearly three metres,

few jackals are foolish enough

to mess with the might of a lappet-faced vulture.

Back at the nest in Kwenia, and Simon and I

finally see what we've been waiting for.

-Oh, look, there's an adult.

-Ah, look. Just landed, that's great.

This is the first time we've seen

one of the parent birds visiting the nest.

-That's a relief actually.

-It is.

When we put, you know, you put the camera that close,

the last thing you want to do is disturb them.

Well, it's getting hot, isn't it? Look at the chick.

-So happy to see Mum's back.

-Yeah.

CHICK CHIRPS

Is that the chick begging, that noise?

That's definitely a begging sound.

Carrying food in their crop, rather than digesting it in their stomach,

means that this parent bird can

bring food back from the Serengeti,

over 100 miles away and still keep it reasonably fresh.

There you go. See it regurgitate?

So that's why she's moving her beak like that?

And the tongue is, literally, pulling the food out of her throat.

-Urgh, it's quite disgusting.

-HE LAUGHS

It's weird cos it's very lovely,

adult feeding chick, but it's really quite disgusting at the same time.

It's so funny seeing them in the nest like this

and not scrapping over a rotten piece of meat on the plains.

And they just suddenly look like stunningly beautiful,

magnificent birds rather than these, sort of, beggars

scrapping over a carcass, don't they?

Anything that happens on this nest over the next few days

is going to be very valuable.

We've never had an opportunity to

look at these things that close before.

As we watched the nest over the next few days,

it became clear to us that it was only being visited by one adult.

Simon assumed it was the mother.

What had happened to the father, we don't know.

But with only one parent,

the chick's chances of survival are slim.

Finding a kilo of meat a day for the chick

puts an enormous pressure on the single mum.

It means travelling huge distances in search of carrion.

The vultures are designed for this.

Ruppell's Vultures have a wingspan

of around two and a half metres, which are shaped for gliding.

They also have specialised haemoglobin in their blood.

It allows them to fly at extremely high altitude.

They've been recorded flying at 11,000 metres,

higher than Everest, higher than any other bird.

There's now plenty of food to be had on the plains.

There's also plenty of competition.

To find enough food for herself and her chick,

the mother's going to have to be assertive and aggressive.

But just how aggressive do vultures actually get?

This camera is a very cool bit of kit.

It's a specialist high-speed camera

and what it will allow me to do is slow the action down

on the vultures.

And when I say slow it down, I mean I can slow it down

up to 80 times with this thing. And what that will allow me to do is

see, in incredible detail, exactly what's going on

when all the vultures are arguing and fighting over the carcass.

There's certainly no shortage of scrapping

amongst the vultures on this kill,

so it's perfect for the high speed camera. And straight away it starts

delivering, giving me a completely new look at the vultures.

I'm starting to see just how incredible vultures really are.

I'm beginning to see the beauty in the grotesque.

The high-speed camera has revealed another side of vultures to me.

They're actually more vicious to each other than I thought.

But I can now see how perfectly designed they are to be like this.

They're designed to fight, they're designed to be tough.

So, it might seem nasty and aggressive to us

but to them it's normal.

And ultimately many of these birds are parents just trying to

find enough food to feed their chicks.

And they're desperate, because the food supply is about to run out.

The wildebeest migration doesn't stay long in the southern Serengeti.

It soon moves off, following the rains into the western corridor...

..where the wildebeest disperse.

The plains now lie empty...

..and for the mother vulture, finding enough food for the chick

becomes increasingly difficult.

Back at the nest in Kwenia, the sun beats down.

The midday temperature here can reach into the 40s

and on the bare cliff edge, there's no respite for the chick.

So, Mum creates a parasol with her wings.

But as I watch her over the days,

I notice she seems to be spending a lot of time shading the chick

and only bringing food every other day.

Perhaps her duties are becoming too stretched.

The chick's appetite is now enormous.

It's growing fast, some of its feathers

at over two centimetres a day.

Without enough food its bones will fail to develop properly

and it will probably die.

Simon explains to me that vultures breed slowly,

only having one chick at a time.

The chances of a chick surviving to adulthood are only around 50%.

With only one parent to feed and protect it,

this chick's chances are much slimmer.

And it gets worse.

That evening, Simon explains why the chick may only have one parent.

The day started by me having a chat with

somebody out in the open plains and I looked up and I saw

a whole kettle of vultures just circling in the sky.

But my attention was drawn to a

few of them which were flying in a funny, erratic manner.

And then some of them just simply tumbled straight out of the air.

Fast glide and a flit and then piling straight into the ground.

I drove over there to go and find him, I couldn't see him

but on my way there, there were carcasses under trees,

virtually everywhere you looked there were dead animals,

like dead jackal and hyena.

People had poisoned with carbofuran,

which is a pesticide used in the agricultural industries.

It is widely used here to kill wildlife.

And it is important to understand that where the actual place is

the poison's put,

the effect of the poison is that it doesn't stay there, it moves.

So you get mini explosions of deaths occurring.

What happened was that the hyena ate the cow...

..went nine kilometres away, died.

These vultures came down to eat it

and within just a few minutes were comatose and dying.

And within a few minutes of that whatever landed on that dead

vulture is also dying.

Inside that pile of dead vultures was one living vulture whose face

had been staring up at the sun until its eyes were completely burnt,

and the corneas were burnt.

We managed to save that one and release it later.

And it was catastrophic for the vultures

cos we lost 187 vultures in just one poisoning incident.

We've had a big decline in vulture numbers in East Africa.

What effect is that then going to have on everything else,

you know, the people and the animals here?

Well, that's a good question cos there's been a similar

thing has happened in India where they've all died from diclofenac

poisoning and it's been banned and we're expecting a recovery.

One of the great arguments that they've had is saying that

human health is at risk if all the vultures do go.

It's not entirely clear exactly what kind of diseases people will get

if there's thousands of dead and rotting animals

lying in the street that do not get ingested by vultures.

But certainly it causes a huge increase in domestic dogs.

And you can see really quite a clear graph we're seeing

the numbers of incidents of rabies amongst people

has shot up in the absence of the vultures.

Other things, such as just filthy water, you know,

disgusting amounts of pathogens just pouring into the main streets.

Similar sort of thing obviously can happen here.

There are many places, even large conservancies in Kenya where

you will go and see a dead animal.

And it just doesn't get consumed by anything other than bacteria

and maggots.

The next morning the mother leaves the nest early. I assume

heading back to the Serengeti,

in search of any remaining carcasses.

A female Verreaux's eagle is on the prowl though.

Patrolling the cliffs on the hunt for vultures.

It was a Verreaux's eagle that knocked poor Gollum

out of the sky and broke his wing.

And an unguarded chick in the nest would make the perfect

meal for this enormous bird.

With only one parent and an eagle on the prowl, I don't think this

chick is going to survive and I don't want to watch it die.

So I decide to leave.

I head north in search of other vultures.

Poisoning is a serious problem.

If India's experience is anything to go by, Africa's

problems are only just beginning.

India's vultures have faced near extinction.

The cost to human health has been staggering.

Vultures had consumed around

20 million tons of rotting meat a year.

As they declined, the feral dog population

which carries rabies, exploded.

This has resulted in over 50,000 extra human deaths from rabies.

It's thought the vulture decline has cost India more than 34 billion.

Vultures are perhaps far more important to us than we realise.

Here in Africa poisoning is more sinister.

Poachers deliberately target

vultures for giving away their positions to park rangers.

And cattle farmers indirectly kill them when they lace carcasses

with carbofuran to poison lions and hyenas.

To understand the effect of poisoning,

Simon's studying how vultures move and more crucially, where they feed.

For the last few years Simon and colleague Darcy Ogada have

been catching vultures and fixing satellite transmitters to them,

in order to gather a greater understanding of their movements.

So while Darcy watches the vultures, Simon sets the trap.

Simon's spent his life working with birds of prey

and catching vultures to him is second nature.

We'll just reverse out, I think.

Here they come.

The aim is to snare a vulture by the foot and then jump out

and grab if before it gets hurt.

The chances of it working are quite slim and our chances

of catching the desired young Ruppell's vulture are even slimmer.

Jackals are the last thing we need.

They'll scare off the vultures

and we risk catching one.

Not a situation either of us want to be in.

It's a waiting game.

Got one. Go, go, go, go, Charlie.

Go, go, go, go, go, go.

-Over his head, quick.

-I'm trying.

-Over the head, over the head. Over the head. Good.

-Got it.

Good, good, well done, brilliant.

That's exactly what we want.

OK, we're going to carry it to the shade underneath the tree.

'A young Ruppell's vulture, the perfect specimen.'

Oh, he's so strong, Simon.

Good, nice shady tree, it won't get heat stress.

'The trick now is to get the satellite transmitter on as fast

'as possible and let the bird go.

'Darcy and Simon know exactly what they're doing

'though and work fast so they don't stress the bird.'

Yeah, they're massively strong things

and really they can carry a kilo of weight.

This thing is pretty much the same weight as a cigarette packet

and really weighs less than a quarter of what his lunch weighs.

And in time, when the battery is finished it will simply

fall off its back and it will be fine.

'Within a few minutes the transmitter's secured to the

'vulture's back.

'It will now transmit a signal giving its location

'every 15 minutes.'

OK, I'm just testing to see it's got lots of flexibility.

It can go over its shoulders, goes over its shoulders, OK.

It feels very heavy this bird and very strong.

OK...put him on the ground...and let him go.

That's OK. He's off.

Ha-ha, well done. Ha-ha.

Do you think we did all right, Simon?

I think we did great.

As you can see he's flying around and literally

within about 20 minutes he would have completely forgotten his experience.

The amount of data we're going to get out of this is incredibly valuable.

We'll be able to know where it goes, where it breeds,

where it feeds, and really without what we just did to it there's

no way we're ever going to be able to prove it.

This really is the only way of getting the data we need.

It's lovely to see him circling over us now.

Looks quite relaxed now, doesn't he?

Over the next few months the young Ruppell's vulture travelled

huge distances covering almost a quarter of Kenya.

Simon and Darcy learned that it was feeding mainly in protected areas,

National Parks and reserves, which are relatively safe from poisoning.

Behaviour like this could be the key to its survival.

Satellite tracking also helps us

understand more about where vultures congregate to feed.

And there's one place they seem to favour above all others.

The Masai Mara.

It's July and the Serengeti rains have come north into Kenya.

Following them, as always, are the wildebeest.

But here they face their greatest challenge.

Crossing the Mara River.

The combination of not being particularly bright

and not particularly good swimmers means that many never reach

the other side of the river.

Perishing instead in the murky water.

Phew. This is just incredible.

The number of wildebeest coming over the edge now is just,

it's just hundreds.

This is the moment every scavenger

and predator in the Masai Mara has been waiting for.

And vultures have flown in from all over East Africa.

One the one hand you've got this panic and fear of all

the wildebeest piling in and then on the other all the vultures

are just sitting amongst it really quiet and calm, waiting to be fed.

There's now a surplus of food,

as the river swells with the corpses of the wildebeest.

And as the waters rise in the rains,

they're carried away downriver to the waiting vultures.

The bodies of up to 10,000 wildebeest have been recorded

floating down the river in a single day.

And when they reach the shallows, they pile up and rot.

This is what the vultures have been waiting for. It's the most

important feeding event of their year.

The hot sun and rotting corpses now turn these shallows into a soup of

bacteria and it's up to the vultures and Marabou storks to clean it up.

Vulture stomach acid is so powerful that it can dissolve metal.

It's this adaptation that means they can eat even the most putrid

meat and destroy dangerous diseases such as rabies, cholera and anthrax.

Diseases which could otherwise

remain in the system and proliferate.

But downriver the carcasses pile up uneaten.

Left to rot in the sun. Leaching bacteria and disease into the river.

The result of East Africa's vulture decline is now starkly obvious.

Vultures have declined by 60% in the Masai Mara in the last ten years.

Not good when they're responsible for consuming

around 70% of the dead animals here.

Without them the meat will just rot, diseases will increase,

as will scavengers such as jackals and hyenas.

This will in turn throw one of the world's most important

eco-systems out of balance.

To be honest, I'm really worried.

Deliberate poisoning of vultures is now increasing,

not just in Kenya but all over Africa.

Extinction is beginning to loom.

The problem is few really care. People like Simon Thomsett

are tragically rare.

We might see vultures as dirty, filthy and ugly...

but we need them.

The more I've got to know them, the more impressed I've become.

The veneer of ugliness that surrounds them

has been stripped away.

When I look at them now, their character, their swagger,

their extraordinary design...I see beauty.

MUSIC: "I Put A Spell On You" Screamin' Jay Hawkins

# Oh, spell

# Oh, spell

# I put a spell on you

# Oh, spell

# Oh, spell

# Because you're mine

# Oh, spell

# Oh, spell

# Stop the things you do

# Oh, spell

# Oh, spell

# Watch out! I ain't lying

# You know I can't stand it

# Oh, spell

# No running around

# Oh, spell

# I can't stand

# Oh, spell

# I can't stand no putting me down

# Oh, spell

# I put a spell on you

# Because...

# Spell. #