BUT WE MUST also protect the sinister, the menacing, the birds of ill-omen. Save the vultures, I say: and, since I am writing these words at a cricket ground in India, save the shite-hawks as well. Not that they need much saving: constantly crossing the ground on languid, grubby wings. They are survivors. Mind you, you can say that about anything and be wrong.

Vultures, for example. Until 15 years ago, there were 40 million vultures in India. The numbers have crashed, a 97 per cent decline. A catastrophe for an unloved bird: face like a gargoyle, wings like an angel. You must concentrate on flight if you want to love vultures: masters of airy insouciance. There are three species affected by the decline: oriental white-backed, long-billed and, now racing towards extinction, the one that’s really in trouble, slender-billed.

The reason is simple. In India, vultures mostly feed on dead livestock, and livestock are now being treated with an anti-inflammatory drug called diclofenac. This is poisonous to vultures. They die within a few days of eating the infected carcasses of cattle and water-buffalo. But there is a perfectly safe alternative called meloxicam. All that is required to save vultures is the will to do so. Scientists presented irrefutable evidence of the meloxicam case to Indian ministers six months ago: nothing has been done.

But let us not despair. This is a battle being fought on two fronts: and there is a scheme in full swing to establish a captive population of slender-bills with a view to releasing birds back into the wild once the wild is a diclofenac-free zone. The first vultures have already been captured: they have 18 birds in Pinjore, Harayana and 14 more in West Bengal.

It’s a start. The scheme, backed by Birdlife International, RSPB and the Bombay Natural History Society, is in it for the long haul: each centre can take 150 birds. The snag is that slender-billed vultures have never been bred in captivity before, so this is a challenging business. Vultures, traditional attendants on death, do not inspire instant love from humans. The lesson, then, is that we need to broaden our capacity for loving. Or lose the richness of the earth.

• SHITE-HAWKS are not much loved either: but right now, at least, they have little need for human affection. They are more properly known as black kites, birds that have exploited their effortlessly elegant flight to become expert urban scavengers across Asia: gaining their unlovely nickname from British troops who used to get the meat stolen from their plates by these bold and skilful birds.

  Kites were a sight of medieval London, feasting on the severed heads of traitors and the other detritus of the city. Presumably they hung about Elsinore as well: Hamlet chides himself that he had neglected to use his uncle as a bird-table delicacy: “I should have fatted all the region kites with this knave’s offal.”

  These were red kites, rather than black, but the silhouette is the same: long, narrow wings, and a deeply forked tail used ostentatiously as a rudder — flying slowly and rather pedantically, eyes always seeking something horrible and disgusting to eat. Not squeamish birds, no. Red kites were once as common in Britain as, well, vultures were in India. But complex circumstances, including the more hygienic disposal of traitors, saw them driven back to secret fastnesses in Wales.

  They, too, became dependent not on human remains but human love; and conservation measures and reintroduction schemes have brought them back. Birdwatchers travel the M40 in danger of terminal distraction as kites strut their stuff above the car roofs, beneath the Chiltern escarpment.

  But out here, the black kites lend an authentically medieval aspect to every Indian town, taking on the job of street-cleaners with effortless authority. They are everyday reminders of death, decay and waste. But for all that, they represent the forces of life: the life-affirming fact that in the natural world there really is no such thing as waste.

• SOMETHING that one organism no longer needs is just a window of opportunity for another. Elephant dung is not so much a pile of crap as a micro-habitat. On the African savannahs there is a beetle that specialises in eating the horns of dead antelopes. Death, too, is nothing more than a new and exciting opportunity. But that is not a new idea. Certainly not in India.