The Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre, the world’s largest facility for protecting and breeding vultures, is hidden in a dense forest of sal and ash trees outside the town of Pinjore in northern India. You get there by following a rutted dirt track that even Google Maps doesn’t know about. Santosh Kumar’s family has lived in a nearby village for almost ten generations. For much of that time, vultures were a daily sight throughout the state of Haryana and, indeed, much of India. “When I was ten and an animal died,” recalled Kumar, a slight 46-year-old, “hundreds of the damn birds would gather.”
 
Like many Indians who live under skies that are no longer darkened by vultures, Kumar, who runs a small shop at the edge of the forest, speaks of the birds wistfully—and conspiratorially. “All the vultures disappeared after an earthquake in Pakistan and never came back,” he told me while handing over an ice-cold bottle of water. “The Pakistanis lured them with rotting corpses.”

Given the suddenness and scale of the vultures’ disappearance, it’s not surprising that the mind reaches for such far-fetched explanations. Sometime in the 1990s vultures started dropping dead throughout India—first in the thousands, then in the millions. By 2007 more than 99% of the estimated 40m vultures in South Asia had died. This was an example of what ecologists call a “functional extinction”: a population so diminished that it can no longer fulfil its role in the ecosystem.