India, Sept. 14 -- T he Egyptian vulture is hard to miss. Its bare-skinned face is the yellow of chicken feet. It wears a spiky mane, and poufy feathers halfway down its legs. A beak shaped like a talon helps its scrape the meat off dead animals. It is small, particularly for a raptor, growing to about 2 ft in height, with a wingspan of about 5 ft. But it's a bird that uses those wings dramatically. The Egyptian vulture's migratory route arcs across 40 countries on three con- tinents: Europe, where it breeds, and Africa and Asia, where it winters and rears its young. That arc is ending prematurely and abruptly, for a number of individuals, as they crash into new power lines and wind farms thrown up across their migratory routes. Older threats persist too, such as poisoned bait laid out by farmers in Europe, aimed at predators attacking their cattle. And, in Africa, the poaching and sale of this threatened species at exorbitant rates, for use in local medicine. The result: Egyptian vulture numbers are falling fast. There has been a 80% decline in the Balkan Peninsula, with number of adult pairs going from 600 in the 1980s to 60 pairs in 2019. There are only about 4,000 individuals overall left in Europe, accord-ing to the Zurich-based Vulture Conservation Foundation. Over the past two decades, there has been a concerted effort to safeguard their three migratory pathways: the Central Asian flyway from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the open scrublands and deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat; the Western European flyway from France, Spain and Portugal to Western Africa via Gibraltar; and the Eastern Mediterranean flyway from Turkey and the Balkans to the Middle-East and East Africa, says Jose Tavares, director of the Vulture Conservation Foundation. With funding from the European Union, an alliance of 20 NGOs from 14 countries launched the initia- tive Egyptian Vulture New LIFE in 2017, and have been working to identify hazardous practices and developments, as a first step towards easing such threats. Meanwhile, increased tagging is helping identify the exact locations and causes of death in individual cases. "A risk-sensitivity map is being created, which overlays the existing network of electrical lines with the density of birds and their flight paths. Simple steps such as windmill companies taking migratory routes into account and taking on the extra cost of insulating their wires can help," Tavares says. "Other migratory birds that use the same routes, such as buzzards, eagles and storks, stand to benefit too."...