India’s vultures are in trouble. The—by now well-known—story is that the populations of once-abundant species were literally decimated, or worse, in the 1990s because they scavenged on dead cattle that had recently been treated with Diclofenac (Mallord et al. 2024). Patented in 1978, Diclofenac is an inexpensive and highly effective non-steroidal painkiller, usually sold under the brand name VoltarenTM. In 2021 alone, Voltaren was prescribed for humans more than 11 million times in the USA, but it also turned out to be an effective painkiller for domestic animals.
By the early 1990s, Diclofenac was being used to relieve the pain of mastitis in the udder’s of cattle, particularly in India. Unfortunately, most of those cattle would die anyway within a few days but religious edicts meant that cattle could not be sacrificed and required a natural death. Only about 4% of India’s 500 million cattle make it to the table (religion, again) and the rest are dumped in landfill where the vultures feast on them.
Diclofenac is fatal to vultures, particularly species in the genus Gyps. Even though only about 10% of dead cattle in India’s landfills had been treated with Diclofenac, models showed that an incidence of Diclofenac in as low as 0.8% of carcasses would result in an annual decline of 90% in the vulture populations that fed on them. And the knock-on effect has been devastating, with up to one million additional human deaths per year in India attributable to the proliferation of rats and communicable diseases at landfills, and an increase of 5 million feral dogs that resulted in the rapid spread of rabies on the subcontinent (Frank and Sudarshan 2024).
The populations of India’s Gyps vultures began to decline precipitously in the 1990s. But it was not until 2004 that Diclofenac was identified as the culprit. By then south Asia’s vulture population had declined from an estimated 50 million in the early 1900s, to an extinction threatening low of about 19,000 birds. As a result the IUCN now lists Gyps indicus (Indian), G. tenuirostris (Slender-billed), G. bengalensis (White-rumped), and Sarcogyps calvus (Red-headed) as critically endangered. Indeed, vultures were once so abundant in India that it was not unusual to see them scavenging carcasses in numbers resembling iconic scenes of vultures in Africa.
Figure 1. Indian Vultures at carcass (CC BY-SA 3.0 from Animalia).
During the early 1800s, vultures were such a prominent feature of the Indian landscape that Lady Elizabeth Symonds Gwillim [1763-1807] included 3 species (Red-headed, Indian, and Egyptian Vultures) in her exquisite, and unpublished, paintings of about 200 of India’s 1300 bird species (Dickenson 2023). Lady Gwillim was the wife of the Englishman, Henry Gwillim, stationed as a puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Madras beginning in 1801. Elizabeth was an avid naturalist and artist in England but may not have painted any birds before arriving in India. Then, in a period of only 6 years before she died, she produced more than 200 lovely paintings of the local birds, usually at life size and with accurate and relevant backgrounds, about one painting every two weeks. Many of her paintings were drawn from life, either from her frequent forays into the countryside, or from live birds kept in her home and procured from professional bird catchers, as well as dead specimens brought to her by friends and correspondents. Her paintings are so lifelike that she must have seen each species alive in nature or captivity.
In 1924, Casey Wood acquired a large selection of Gwillim’s watercolours for the Blacker-Wood Library at McGill University in Montreal (Wood 1925). These included 121 paintings of birds, 31 of fishes, and 12 of plants. To the best of his knowledge, Wood thought these paintings had likely been squirrelled away in a large wooden portfolio in the basements of art dealers after Henry Gwillim’s death in 1837.
Lady Gwillim’s paintings are remarkable not only for being life size but also because she almost always caught the ‘jizz’ of the bird, that elusive trait that makes the bird look real. Compared to other bird paintings from the 18th and early 19th centuries her paintings look remarkably fresh and ‘modern’.
John James Audubon [1785-1851] and Elizabeth Gould [1804-1841] are correctly credited with pioneering the painting of birds life size in their natural habitats with lifelike poses and behaviours. They could not have known about Lady Gwillim’s work but she clearly anticipated their style by at least a couple of decades. For my money, Gwillim’s birds are more life-like and the economy of line and brush in her work, and the accuracy of colour, is outstanding.
Until 1975, Gwillim’s paintings were mainly stored in the McGill Library’s archives, but that year some were loaned out for an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. The museum’s outstanding dioramist, Terry Shortt, considered Gwillim’s paintings to be “the finest ever done of Asian birds.” As he noted, she was able to “capture the saucy, perky attitudes of these creatures in a way [that no one else did until] a full century later”, comparable to the works of Henrik Grønvold [1842-1912] and J.G. Keulemanns [1858-1940] in the late 1900s (Wood 1925). Terry knew his birds and is considered by many to be one of the finest bird artists of the 20th century, capturing in ink and watercolour (Shortt 1975), as well as scratchboard (Snyder 1957), the jizz of birds with an economy of line and brush much like Gwillim’s. I worked as a preparator at the ROM in 1967 and would often visit Shortt during my lunch hour break to watch him paint and draw birds unrelated to his work as a dioramist. Like many great artists, he worked quickly and largely from memory, often producing a complete and superb rendering and in less than an hour.
Further Reading
Dickenson, V. (2023) Lady Gwillim and the birds of Madras. Notes Rec. 77: 647–670.
Frank, E. & Sudarshan, A. (2024) The social costs of keystone species collapse: evidence from the decline of vultures in India. American Economic Review, in press 6 doi: 10.1257/aer.20230016.
Mallord, J.W., Bhusal, K.P., Joshi, A.B., Karki, B., Chaudhary, I.P., Chapagain, D., Thakuri, D.C., Rana, D.B., Galligan, T.H., Requena, S., Bowden, C.G.R. & Green, R.E. (2024) Survival rates of wild and released White‐rumped Vultures (Gyps bengalensis), and their implications for conservation of vultures in Nepal. Ibis 166: 971–985.
Shortt, T.M. (1975) Not as the Crow Flies. McClelland and Stewart Ltd, Toronto.
Shortt, T. M. Elizabeth Gwillim: A distinguished bird artist. Rotunda 8(3): 20-29
Snyder, L.L. 1957. Arctic Birds of Canada. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
Wood, C.A. 1925. Lady [Elizabeth] Gwillim—artist and ornithologist. Ibis 67: 594–599.
Image credits
Top right: Gwillim’s painting of Egyptian Vulture. Courtesy McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special collections.
Middle: Gwillim’s paintings of Red-headed (left) and Long-billed (right) Vultures (not to scale). Courtesy McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special collections.
Right: Gwillim’s painting of the feet of a Red-headed Vulture. Courtesy McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special collections.
Bottom: King Vulture by Terry Shortt.
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