The vulture mother feeds its chick. Courtesy Bombay Natural History Society

Alipurduar, July 21: A north Bengal facility has become the first in the world to successfully hatch the slender-billed vulture in captivity.

The chick was born in February and is doing well, the centre run by the Bombay Natural History Society in Jalpaiguri said today.

The centre manager, Sachin Ranade, said: “In no zoo anywhere in the world such a breeding has taken place. We are very encouraged as the slender-billed vulture is a critically-endangered species and very rare.”

There are six pairs of the species at the captive-breeding centre for vultures in Rajabhatkhawa, about 130km from Siliguri.

According to Ranade, there are only 200 slender-billed vultures in India.

The north Bengal centre is one of only two such in India. The Bombay Natural History Society and the state forest department had together set it up in 2005. The other centre is in Pinjore, Haryana, and a third is being set up in Guwahati.

A white-backed vulture was bred at Pinjore in 2007.

One of the world’s foremost scavengers and crucial for the preservation of the ecology, vultures began to die in hundreds from the early ’90s. Post-mortems revealed that a drug called diclofenac, used frequently to treat aches and inflammations in cattle, was killing the birds. The vultures were falling prey to the diclofenac in the dead cattle they were scavenging.

Ranade said that during a census in 2008, only four-five vultures had been sighted in north Bengal.

Besides the dozen slender-billed vultures, his centre now has 49 white-backed vultures and 19 long-billed ones. “Our target is to have 200 birds in the next 15 years. Once the nestlings mature, we will start releasing them in the wild in groups,” Ranade said.

A forester said they were trying to spread awareness among villagers on the need to avoid diclofenac. “The drug is officially banned but we will organise awareness programmes in 40 villages around the centre,” R.P. Saini, field director of the Buxa Tiger Reserve and member-secretary of the vulture project.

The birds at the centre are fed with goat meat. Saini said: “We will start collecting carcasses of dead cattle as that is their natural food. There are also plans to construct a cold-storage facility where the carcasses can be kept.”