When a wedding procession moves through Chirgaon in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, there is one thing residents do not hear: a DJ.

The village has prohibited DJs and loudspeakers since 2002. The village also restricts firecrackers during festivals and other celebrations. The reason is that Chirgaon’s residents were trying to keep their vulture nests quiet.

Two decades ago, the village had only 22 vultures of two species, the white-rumped and long-billed vultures. Now, according to the last census in 2022, 347 vultures have been recorded in the area.

The recovery cannot be attributed to the DJ ban alone. 

It followed years of work by Premsagar Mestri, founder of the Society of Eco-Endangered Species Conservation and Protection (SEESCAP), along with local bird enthusiasts and villagers. They protected nesting trees, reduced human disturbance around breeding sites and worked to ensure food for the birds.

When Mestri began looking into the decline of Chirgaon’s vultures, the problem had to be understood in the context of a much larger collapse.

India’s vulture population had fallen dramatically from the millions recorded in the 1980s. The decline of the white-rumped, long-billed and slender-billed vultures was particularly severe, with losses exceeding 90% in some species.

What does a DJ have to do with a vulture?

The science of noise pollution provides part of the answer.

A 2023 review in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution examined 48 peer-reviewed studies published between 1995 and 2021 on how chronic human-made noise affects animal communities.

In 38 of those studies, 79% researchers found at least one negative effect associated with noise exposure. These included reductions in abundance or species richness, nesting, offspring survival and hatching........

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