Gamla Nature Reserve, Golan Heights -- With all the international debate
and Israeli political furor over the future of the Golan Heights, a question
asked by naturalists gets lost in the din: "If this area is returned by Israel
to Syria, what will happen to the struggling colony of Griffon Vultures?"

Since the area was captured from Syria in the Six Day War of 1967, the
Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority has been working to
restore the population of this large carrion-eating bird. A century ago,
more than 500 breeding pairs of Griffon Vultures lived in areas today
controlled by Israel. Today, however, that number has been reduced to
between 70 and 80 breeding pairs. 

Of these, between 40 and 45 breeding pairs live in nooks of a cliff at the
unique Gamla Nature Reserve, close to the site of an ancient Jewish city
that was conquered by the Romans in 67CE. The bird is considered
"vulnerable" but not "endangered," as there are large colonies of Griffon
Vultures existing along the Mediterranean shores of Europe.

There are mixed feelings among Israeli naturalists about whether a
resumption of Syrian sovereignty over this area will be beneficial or
harmful to the Griffon Vultures.

Michal Ferro, a ranger at the Gamla Nature Reserve, told this reporter last
month that she harbors great feelings of ambivalence on this issue. While
some people believe that the Syrians would hunt and kill everything, she
said, "I am not sure that would happen." 

A demilitarized zone would be a likely result of a peace negotiation, she
speculated. "I hope (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Barak won't let the
Syrians helicopter around here, and I don't think he would let the tanks
shoot around here, and in that case, maybe this area would be much less
disturbed than it is now," she said.

"I don't know the culture of the Syrians; I don't know if they would really
be hunters," Ferro said. On the other hand, she said, she doesn't know if
Syrians would bring to pasture on the Golan as many cattle as Israeli
settlers now maintain on the heights -- a herd of 15,000. Whenever a
cow in this herd dies of natural causes, or by setting off one of the many
land mines that litter the Golan, it provides a feast for the vultures. 
Would such food supply be as plentiful under Syrian administration?

Another factor that Ferro said she can't be sure about: "I can't believe
that the Syrians would be as enthusiastic hikers as the Israelis are" and
thus might be less likely to disturb the vulture nests or the sensitive
habitat. "So maybe we should think about it this way," she said. "The
cliffs and the canyon could be quite isolated and quiet places."

Ofer Vahat, a zoologist who serves as scientific director for the Nature
Authority, believes that if there is sufficient international concern Syrian
President Hafez el-Assad will help to protect the Griffon Vultures and
other raptors that live on the Golan Heights. 

"I would like to tell you a little story about this," Vahat told me during a
visit on another day to the Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan Zoological Center. "I
participated in a scientific conference in Berlin in 1992 in which about
500 raptor experts participated. A group of German experts showed
horrible pictures from Syria about hunting birds and keeping wild birds in
terrible conditions in captivity and so on. So, one of the resolutions of
this conference was an appeal to President Assad to ban shooting and
hurting the raptors.

"And I just participated in a similar conference two years ago in which
the German group told that following this, Assad made regulations in
Syria in which people were not allowed to shoot raptors or trap raptors
anymore," Vahat said. "And I think this is a very good sign that he is
sensitive to what the scientific community is doing, and that he has some
conscience for raptors."

Vahat said he believed that the issue should "be part of the peace
conference, and an agreement would be very beneficial." He added: "Of
course, there is the great potential for tourism for the Syrians" that an
active colony of vultures could provide.

Ohat Hatzofe, a Nature Authority zoologist who oversees all programs for
birds of prey in Israel, said Israel's own record for protecting vultures is,
at best, mixed. "We brought the development to the Golan Heights, and
whereas once you needed three hours in order to drive to Gamla Nature
Reserve from the Israeli side, now you can do it in less than an hour," he
said.

"So hunters have easier access, and also power lines that we developed
there caused the electrocution of over 100 Griffon Vultures during the
time of our occupation -- or whatever you want to call it -- of the Golan
Heights," Hatzofe said. 

Ferro recalled there was also the case of an Israeli farmer on the Golan
who tried in July of 1998 to kill wolves threatening his herd by leaving
for them one dead cow, around which he spread approximately 100
poisoned chickens. "He waited for the wolves, but the wolves that night
did not arrive. The vultures did arrive the next afternoon and the morning
after. And the sight was horrible -- around 35 Griffon Vultures were
found dead. These were only the ones that were found. We assume that
more were dead somewhere else but not found.

"At that time it was the very end of the breeding season, so some of the
chicks did not get their food because the adults had died. We had to rappel
down (the cliffs of Gamla), take the chicks out, put them into
rehabilitation cages, and it was quite a tragedy," the ranger said.

"Some people come to Gamla and see all the vultures here and they say,
'Well, things must be okay; certainly much better than 1998' but we tell
them that we cannot say yet, because some of the dead vultures were just
coming into maturity. They were the vultures that were about to be
breeding later on this year, or maybe next year."

The farmer told authorities that he never intended to hurt the Griffon
Vultures and apologized for his action. Months later, the same farmer
telephoned the Nature Authority to report sighting an injured Griffon
Vulture in the wild. Notwithstanding the farmer's apparently stricken
conscience, Ferro believes it was a mistake not to prosecute him.

"We think raptors are very important to the ecological system because
they are one of the most important predators," Vahat said. "Therefore not
having raptors in the system would make the system completely out of
balance, which of course is very dangerous."

* * *

Israel's program to reestablish its population of Griffon Vultures is being
conducted both in the wild and also at the zoos.

"Altogether there are about 50 Griffon Vultures in captivity which
produce about 10 chicks a year, and which are released into the wild at
Mount Carmel (near Haifa) each year," Hatzofe said. 

As for the 70-80 breeding pair found in the wild, "we have the big colony
in the Gamla Nature Reserve, and we have some small colonies in the
Galilee, the Judean Desert and the Negev Mountains. "

Hatzofe believes that "maybe we have succeeded to slow down or stop the
decrease of the population by (establishing) feeding stations, by
monitoring and surveillance of the nests in the wild, and by mitigating
some of the mortality factors, such as electrocution, secondary poisoning,
lack of suitable food and disturbance by military helicopters
maneuvering." The cause also has been aided, he said, "by the
reintroduction in Mount Carmel where they became extinct in 1952."

Although the colony of Griffon Vultures at Gamla is the largest in the
Middle East, "still the breeding success is very low," according to ranger
Ferro.

She said that not all the chicks produced by the 40 to 45 breeding pairs at
Gamla reach fledgling stage; typically only 13 to 15 each year survive that
long.

Over the last six years, the Natures Authority conducted a comprehensive
study trying to determine why the mortality rate was so high. "We
started with the thought that the visitors around Gamla, and the Air Force
activity were affecting them," Ferro said.

As a result, visitors were prohibited from hiking to the nests or to the
valley below them and the Air Force was persuaded to regulate flights in
the Gamla area, but still the mortality rate did not decrease. "Then in
1997 we started rapelling down to the nests to see the chicks' condition
and to learn a bit more maybe about the food supply and the food quality,"
she said. 

That's when rangers realized that adult vultures were bringing back
pieces of metal -- shrapnel and other debris of war -- to the nest. The
adult vultures apparently mistook the metal for pieces of bone which are
necessary to supply the chicks with calcium. 

Once fed the metal, "the chick could choke, of course," Ferro said. "Then
if it does swallow the metal piece, it can stay in its stomach and the
chick can suffer later on from metal poisoning. And maybe, most
importantly, the chick is deprived of calcium so it grows up very
deformed, with soft wings."

Ferro said that every year for the last three years, "we have collected
from the nests 10-15 deformed or dead chicks or dying chicks which
already were in a non-reversible state. We could not supply the calcium
back to cure them.

"The solution is either cleaning the Golan of all the metal pieces, which is
of course impossible, or to build feeding stations and to try to make sure
that vultures use them. Besides the dead meat that is put at the feeding
station, we also spread crushed bones."

One feeding station put up near Gamla isn't used that much by the vultures.
They seem to prefer similar stations elsewhere in the Golan or in the
Galilee. "We think that is because the Gamla station is really close to
home and I like to joke that they are like we are; they don't like to eat at
home, they like to fly away to some other restaurant." 

Another strategy, which Israelis learned from wildlife conservationists in
Africa, is "spreading crushed bones whenever a dead cow is found
somewhere in the Golan. We have very good cooperation with the farmers;
whenever they have a dead cow, they call us." 

As a result of these programs, Ferro said, "hopefully next year I can tell
you that we had a wonderful breeding rate this year."

* * *

At the zoos, meanwhile, efforts to increase the population of Griffon
Vultures begin by removing an egg from a Griffon Vulture's nest, then
putting it in an incubator. Normally, this will prompt the female to lay
another egg, potentially doubling the population of hatchlings.

Amelia Terkel, curator at the Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan Zoological Center, said
over the years her zoo has produced something like 12 chicks. "Of the
eggs that are taken from the nest, the chicks are raised either by another
vulture or hand-raised," she said. "It is very similar in the way it is
managed to the California Condor program."

Terkel is particularly familiar with California because she grew up in the
Golden State, where her father, UC-Berkeley physicist Emilio Segre, won
the 1959 Nobel Prize for his discovery of anti-matter.

Although the Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan Zoological Center has been using hand
puppets to raise the incubated Griffon Vulture chicks, and thereby has
avoided "imprinting" them with human characteristics, Terkel said a
recent article in the Audobon Society magazine has cast doubt on the
effectiveness of this widely-utilized method. She said the article
suggested that birds raised with puppets are more clumsy than other birds
and not as well adapted to their environment. "We have to reevaluate," she
said.

At the Tisch Family Zoological Gardens in Jerusalem -- better known as
the Biblical Zoo -- a novel method of raising chicks taken from their
natural parents has been the source of much comment. Two male Griffon
Vultures -- dubbed the "gay couple" -- have been teaming up the last
several years as foster parents.

Shmulik Yedvab, a zoologist at the Biblical Zoo, related that "three years
ago it was noticed that two of the males created a pair among themselves. 
They rejected females and acted like a family. They copulated, built
nests, everything.

"At the beginning, we thought about separating the two of them because
every male that is unmatched with a female for us is a loss," Yedvab said.
"We want to breed these animals as much as we can. But since their
pairing was so strong, we thought about another idea which was fostering. 
Instead of raising chicks by hand, which causes problems of imprinting,
we thought about using them as foster parents for the nestlings.

"In the beginning we just gave them a dummy egg, which is an egg filled
with plaster and they incubated it very well. So later on, when two
nestlings hatched the same day at Tel Aviv, we brought one of them to this
pair. The process was to take the nestling which was just hatching from
an egg, put it again in a different egg, cover it with plaster so it would
have to hatch again in the nest, and when this nestling hatched the couple
took care of him very well."

The "gay" Griffon Vultures have been named Yehuda and Daishik, with the
former typically spending most time on the nest. "They raised the chick
and this process repeated again last year," Yedvab said. "This year we
were going to do it again, but now we see signs of breaking for this
linkage because Daishik now is copulating with a female -- cheating on
Yehuda, you might say. 

"So what we are thinking now is to take Yehuda out of the enclosure and
match him with a female. Daishik already has copulated with a female, so
maybe he can stay where he is. But this all will occur after the current
breeding season."

Anybody who likes vultures probably likes cliff-hangers. So we can end
this episode of the Griffon Vultures' story with three questions. What
will happen if Syria takes over the Golan? Will zookeepers abandon
puppets when they hand-raise vulture chicks? And will Yehuda and
Daishik remain a pair, or will they go "straight"? Stay tuned.