A picture on social media May 10 showed eight vulture carcasses lying side by side, all of them victims of poisoning. The snapshot sums up the tragedy of the griffon vulture population in the Golan Heights, which until a decade ago numbered about 130. Today, there are no more than five of them left. On May 12, the police reportedly arrested a 30-year-old man who is suspected of poisoning the vultures.

The Eurasian vulture, also called the biblical vulture, weighs no more than eight kilos (about 18 pounds) and has a wingspan of up to 2.80 meters (9 feet). This vulture feeds on carcasses and is prevalent in Mediterranean basin countries. For many years, numerous vultures nested in the Gamla Stream cliffs of the Golan Heights and were a tourist attraction. Tens of thousands of visitors flocked to the nature reserve to observe the vulture colony that nested in the cliffs above the stream. However, over the years the vultures have fallen victim to systematic poisoning attempts. The worst instance of poisoning took place in 1998 when about 40 vultures were found dead after eating the carcasses of poisoned cattle or wild animals.

“Cattle breeders and farmers illegally scatter poison for various reasons,” Ohad Hatzofe, an avian ecologist with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA), told Al-Monitor. “Sometimes it’s because they want to eliminate predators —  wolves, jackals and foxes — that threaten their flocks; sometimes it’s due to a dispute over grazing land. Most of the farmers are law-abiding citizens, but all you need is one person to place poison to harm the vultures. The reason that vultures are so vulnerable is because they live in flocks. Dozens of them surround a carcass to eat it, and if the carcass is poisoned, then all of them will be poisoned.”

Hatzofe is frustrated and angry, especially with regard to the current poisoning. “We had equipped three of the poisoned vultures with GPS transmitters and they had tags and rings. We saw that they had stopped moving and that their body temperature fell; we understood immediately that a tragedy had taken place,” he said. “My greatest frustration is that I know it will happen again. There is no punishment, no control. The bullets of an entire gun cartridge are nothing compared to the potential of damage caused by poisoning. These criminals scatter substances in quantities that can poison dozens of human beings [as well].”