Juvenile slender-billed vultures are extremely similar to adults save for the white down on the back base of its neck, which it loses as it matures.

[10] The slender-billed vulture is found in India from the Gangetic plain north, west to Himachal Pradesh, south potentially as far as northern Odisha, and east through Assam.

On occasion, slender-billed vultures will travel distances when scavenging for food, and have been recorded as well traversing past the borders of neighboring countries such as Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Once the pair and nest is established, slender-billed vultures almost exclusively lay one egg for each clutch, which takes around a month and a half (50 days) to incubate.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has placed the approximate number of slender-billed vultures living beyond confines at about 1,000 in 2009 and predictions estimate total extinction within the next decade amongst the wild population.

Its decline is largely due to the use of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) diclofenac in working farm animals.

[15] In an effort to combat this, India has also limited the version of the drug for humans being sold in vials any larger than 3 mL in an attempt to discourage its illegal use on livestock, which would need a significantly higher dosage to show results.

[14] However, it appears that there has been no evidence of Diclofenac in Cambodia, which has placed an emphasis on the preservation of the small population that still exists there, as they are less likely to have issues with breeding due to the presence of the drug.

[14] Captive-breeding programs in India are aiming to conserve the species, and it is hoped that vultures can be released back in the wild when the environment is free of diclofenac.

[19] The group SAVE (Saving Asia's Vultures from Extinction) has also begun in the past decade an effort to create a multitude of "Vulture Safe Zones", which are heavily protected areas that have at least a 100 km radius that aim to be created around crucial breeding populations of the species.

The goal is to create a safe place for the vultures to reproduce again as well as achieving outreach to public and governmental groups.