Old video falsely shared as vultures flocking to Ayodhya ahead of Ram Temple consecration

What is the claim?

A video of a flock of vultures is going viral on social media with the claim that the raptors have descended on the city of Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, ahead of the consecration ceremony of the Ram Temple (scheduled for January 22). The viral video, which shows a committee of vultures on the side of the road, has been linked to the mythological bird Jatayu from the Hindu epic Ramayana, and is being shared to claim that devotees of Ram have begun to come to Ayodhya. (According to Ramayana, when Ram’s wife Sita was being abducted by Ravana, a vulture named Jatayu sacrificed himself while trying to save her. )

A user on X (formerly Twitter) shared the video with a lengthy caption in Hindi, which loosely translates to: "Jatayu’s herd visible in Ayodhya...A flock of vultures seen in Ayodhya. People are saying that before the consecration of the Ram temple, Lord Ram Devotees have started reaching Ayodhya…”  The post (archived  here) had received over 130,000 views at the time of 

This video was also shared widely by users across social media platforms with similar narratives, and archived versions of such posts can be viewed here and here.

Screenshots of the viral posts circulating online.(Source: X/YouTube/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)

However, this video is not recent and dates back to at least 2021.

How did we verify this?

A reverse image search using a keyframe from the viral video showed us that the video has been online since at least October 2021. The video was shared by the Facebook page ‘Dooz دوز’ on October 8, 2021, with a caption in Arabic that roughly translates to: “Do you know the name of this bird?” Dooz listed itself as a news and media website on its Facebook bio and has shared a phone number with a Palestinian ISD code.

Screenshot of the viral video shared by ‘Dooz دوز’  on Facebook in 2021. (Source: Facebook/Modified by Logically Facts)

Our research showed that the video had also gone viral in March 2022 as well. TV9 Marathi, a local news website, had published a screenshot from this video in an article published on March 24, 2022. The article was headlined “Emergency meeting held on a serious matter, see viral video of vultures (translated from Marathi).” The report said that Dipanshu Kabra, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, had shared the now-viral video on X (then called Twitter) on March 23, 2022, with the humorous caption, “Surely an emergency meeting has been called on some serious matter (translated from Hindi).”

Screenshot of the news report and the post by the IPS office in 2022. (Source: Screenshot/ TV9marathi.com/X)

While we could not independently verify where the video is from, the above evidence shows that it has been online for at least more than two years. The video cannot show recent visuals of vultures congregating in Ayodhya ahead of the Ram Temple inauguration.

The verdict

An old video that has been online since at least  2021 has been shared with the claim that it shows vultures, the species that the mythological bird Jatayu belonged to, visiting Ayodhya before the Ram Temple consecration. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.