The forest police in southwest Yunnan’s Jinggu County recently rescued a large bird, which, experts say, turned out to be the slender-billed vulture, an endangered species. It’s the first time that the bird was spotted in the province.

The bird was discovered by a local villager surnamed Wang on July 4, who was fishing at the Xiangshui reservoir. At the sight of the large but weak bird, Wang immediately called the police. Having got some meat at the Jinggu forest police station, it recovered somewhat. 

The slender-billed vulture is an old bird species native to sub-Himalayan regions and Southeast Asia. It is critically endangered since 2002 as the population on the Indian subcontinent has declined rapidly.

"It is indeed a slender-billed vulture whose population is around 1,000-2,499 in the world,” said Yang Xiaojun, a research fellow at Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2017, the bird was listed as a threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. 

Reporting by Li Zongying and Yu Ze (Yunnan Net); trans-editing by Wang Shixue