Police vulture tracking plan fails to fly

German police had high hopes for vultures. Photo / ThinkStock

German police had high hopes for vultures.

A revolutionary German plan to use vultures to find missing corpses appears to have crash-landed after trainers behind the project admitted that the birds preferred to walk rather than fly, spent a lot of time fighting each other, and could not tell the difference between human and animal remains.

The Hanover police commissioner, Rainer Hermann, hit on the idea of using American turkey vultures to help officers after watching a nature film which showed how the birds could spot a mouse in a forest from 1000m.

"The vultures could be much more efficient than tracker dogs," Hermann said last year. "We can't even keep up with them on the ground."

The police have yet to say whether the idea was just pie in the sky.

- Independent