Since mid-March, at least 12 vultures have been poisoned in Israel in at least three separate instances. Ten of the birds died. One indirect victim of these poisonings is a chick of the genus Gyps fulvus (the griffon vulture), the type of vulture that appears in the Bible. The chick is less than three weeks old, but it is gradually coming to regard an older female vulture named Shoshana as a mother figure. There is no physical contact between the birds. All their communications are vocal and visual. He can see Shoshana outside his special cage, known as the Nursery, where he is fed by a tube with a vulture’s beak at the end to make him feel that it is actually his mother feeding him. In addition, the Nursery is heated to make the chick feel that it is still in its nest.

At the Carmel Hai-Bar Nature Reserve in northern Israel, animal populations in danger of extinction are rehabilitated, bred and reintroduced into the wild. The vulture chick has never seen the staff of the Nature and Parks Authority working at the reserve although they have been caring for it since it hatched. The bird was rescued from a nest on the Gamla cliff in the Golan Heights, where it had been abandoned after its parents ate a poisoned carcass. Their suspicions raised, game wardens working for the Nature and Parks Authority soon found five dead griffon vultures and two dead cinereous vultures, which are also at high risk of extinction. They, too, had died from poisoning.

Yigal Miller, who is responsible for the breeding and release of birds of prey into nature throughout Israel, said, “We went into poisoning mode and checked the nests. An older vulture can go without food for two weeks, but a chick needs to eat every day, so we have to see if the parents are sharing the watch. If one of the birds is injured, the other bird cannot leave the nest. It will stay there until it finally gives up and goes to find food itself. Our observations showed that the birds were not, in fact, taking turns at the nest and that one egg had been abandoned.”

A rescue company rappelled down to the nest to extract the egg. It was then placed in a special incubator and transferred to the Carmel Hai-Bar reserve, where it was X-rayed and weighed. “We detected a major abnormality in the egg, but with the help of an electronic hatchery (which includes on-camera supervision 24/7), we were able to perform a kind of ‘pregnancy watch’ on the egg to ensure that it didn’t hatch prematurely. In nature, it would not have hatched at all,” said Miller.