Keep Calm and Carrion
Text: Tim Jackson. Photography: Various. Article from the July 2013 issue of Africa Geographic Magazine.
Vultures are not, to put it gently, near the top of many safari-goers ‘must-see’ lists. Neither handsome nor fully fledged predators, they and their scavenging ways have not been valued in popular culture or by positive press.
And yet, without vultures, the wild lands – and not a few urban environments – they call home would be infinitely worse off. Sadly, this is all too real a prospect, as Tim Jackson discovered when he investigated the challenges facing these intriguing birds.
Vulture’s Eye-view
Vultures are one of the few creatures that rely solely on scavenging. Without their highly effective sanitation services, carcasses can take three times as long to decompose, with all the negative implications for mammalian scavengers and the spread of diseases they may carry.
Sadly, all is not well in the world of vultures. The precipitous decline of several Asian species over the past 20 years, owing mainly to the accidental ingestion of a veterinary drug used to treat livestock, is well documented. But how are vulture populations across Africa faring? And what are the main threats to the continent’s species?
Africa is home to 11 vulture species, which face a broader spectrum of threats than their Asian cousins do. Some recent statistics paint a sobering picture. In southern Africa the Egyptian vulture is no longer thought to breed. In West Africa populations of all vulture species, save the hooded, have collapsed by an average of 95 per cent in rural areas over the past 30 years. Over a similar period, vultures in Kenya’s Masai Mara region have declined by 62 per cent, while the north of the country has lost 70 per cent of its population in just three years. Only one breeding pair of bearded vultures is thought to remain. The situation in North Africa is even worse: in Morocco both the lappet-faced and cinereous vultures have been extirpated.
Despite these alarming trends, vulture numbers across the continent aren’t very well known. ‘The biggest challenge is that there are such huge gaps in our knowledge about Africa’s vultures,’ says André Botha, manager of the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Birds of Prey Programme.
Nonetheless, there has been recent and widespread recognition of the plight of some of these birds. In 2011 the hooded vulture, whose population is thought to have declined by an average of 62 per cent over the past 40 to 50 years, was classified as Endangered for the first time by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That same year the organisation established the Vulture Specialist Group of its Species Survival Commission (SSC) to advocate and create greater awareness of vulture conservation. In 2012 both the Rüppell’s and white-backed vultures were listed as Endangered, while the predicament of the lappet-faced vulture is on the radar as well. In southern Africa the bearded vulture has been uplisted to Critically Endangered.
In fact, the partially vegetarian palm-nut vulture is the only species to apparently buck the trend, although its success has come at a price. ‘It is the only species that is actually doing well,’ says Botha, who also serves as co-chair of the IUCN SSC Vulture Specialist Group. ‘This is partly because it has benefited from the palm-nut plantations that have destroyed habitats for a whole range of other species. It has also benefited from the fishing industry in Africa’s larger lakes.’
Here we look at some of the threats that Africa’s vultures face.
Shrinking Sanctuary
The major threat vultures face across Africa is the loss and fragmentation of their habitat,’ says Botha. ‘Birds can no longer forage and find food outside protected areas, but it’s difficult to quantify and get a real idea of how important this is,’ he says. ‘Many cliff-nesters, like the Cape vulture, also breed outside protected areas.’ The same goes for their northern cousin, Rüppell’s vulture, whose breeding cliffs tend to lie outside sanctuaries too.
‘Most other species now breed largely within protected areas,’ says Botha. ‘In South Africa that’s the Kruger [National Park], the Kgalagadi [Transfrontier Park] and a number of smaller provincial reserves. If you look in East Africa for breeding white-backed or lappet-faced vultures, you’ll find them in the Serengeti and in the Masai Mara – places where there is habitat for them.’
Beyond the borders of sanctuaries, both breeding success and habitat are decidedly lower in comparison. ‘Birds go out there and look for dead animals and they can’t find any in the landscape. Even where there is livestock farming, animals that die are removed from the veld and consumed by people. So the availability of carcasses is lower than it was.’
The only country to go against the grain is Ethiopia. ‘[The country] is unique in that you can see these birds anywhere, even bearded and white-headed vultures, because they’ve had a long co-evolution with humans,’ says Kenya-based Darcy Ogada of The Peregrine Fund. ‘So you find Rüppell’s and white-backed vultures just foraging on the side of the road, with people walking by. It doesn’t happen elsewhere in East Africa, but in Ethiopia you get this unique co-existence. Things are a lot better for vultures there than, I would say, probably anywhere else in Africa.’
Eating Out
In South Africa, since the late 1970s and early ’80s, the dearth of available food has led to the establishment of supplementary feeding sites or ‘vulture restaurants’. ‘Cape vultures in the Magaliesberg, for instance, are dependent on feeding sites. For bearded vultures too, we’ve actively set up a network of feeding sites in the range to provide them with safe carcasses,’ says Botha.
In principle the idea of feeding sites is sound. In practice it exposes the birds to several risks. Kerri Wolter, founder and manager of the vulture conservation programme VulPro, expands. ‘Potentially you create another problem as the sites rely on farmers providing animals that have died. Most of those animals have been treated with veterinary drugs, some of which are highly toxic to vultures, as diclofenac showed us in the Asian vulture crisis,’ she warns.
‘There are several other drugs that are extremely toxic to vultures such as ketoprofen, which is used in farming, and phenylbutazone, used in the horse-racing industry. If people have a vulture restaurant and don’t know about this, or someone provides a carcass and hasn’t been truthful about what they’ve used to treat the animal, it could wipe out an entire colony. Vulture restaurants are a good thing, but only if they are very, very well managed.’
Besides inadvertent poisoning, another potential problem with familiarising vultures to feeding sites is that it potentially exposes the birds to unscrupulous individuals – poachers or traditional medicine collectors – who poison them deliberately. ‘So feeding sites are not as cut and dried as we’d like them to be,’ says Wolter.
‘The other issue we need to address is the threat of lead poisoning,’ adds Botha. ‘Some vulture carcasses that have been analysed have shown quite high levels of lead in their blood. Bullets, for instance, tend to fragment into hundreds of pieces that spread into the carcass.’ Vultures ingest the lead and over time can succumb to lead poisoning. ‘We now recommend that the area along the entire bullet track in a carcass be removed, which reduces the chances of lead poisoning considerably.’
Collateral Damage
Poisoning is still the main issue we are confronted with across Africa,’ says Botha. ‘Very often the plan is not to kill vultures or other avian scavengers – they are a bycatch of attempts to catch mammalian predators.’ He refers to East Africa. ‘Here, for example, vultures are poisoned by a pesticide called carbofuran, which is used fairly widely in agriculture. Contaminated carcasses are being put out to kill lions on the fringes of national parks in both Tanzania and Kenya – and they have killed a considerable number of vultures too.’
South Africa faces similar issues. Wolter explains: ‘Organophosphate poisoning is the major concern in South Africa. Farmers place poison in a carcass to target so-called problem animals like jackals, caracals, leopards, hyaenas and cheetahs, and vultures end up locating these carcasses. Poison doesn’t affect just one vulture; a carcass can potentially wipe out an entire colony.’ It’s a fate that befell the country’s largest Cape vulture colony when two massive poisoning events at Roberts’ Farm in the Magaliesberg wiped out 500 breeding pairs. ‘Although a handful of pairs remain, no birds bred there last year so it has effectively become an extinct breeding colony,’ says Wolter. ‘Educating the farming community has become crucial in trying to prevent this.’
Catastrophic poisoning events are all too common, as large numbers of birds gravitate to the same feeding site. Only last year 191 vultures, white-backed and lappet-faced among them, died in Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park at a single elephant carcass laced with the poison Temik – that is a record number of vulture deaths in the country.
There are similar macabre records across the continent. More than 200 vultures died, also at an elephant carcass, on Manyara Ranch in Tanzania earlier this year. Here Furazolidon was allegedly used, even though the chemical is now officially banned in Tanzania. Similarly, Kenya’s largest known poisoning incident wiped out 187 vultures as a result of carbofuran.
Events like these emphasise the scale of the problem, not just in terms of numbers, but geographically – and politically – too. ‘Vultures move over huge distances and multiple countries, so a single poisoned carcass in southern Ethiopia could kill a hundred birds that were perhaps born and raised in the Col Mountains in Tanzania,’ explains Ogada. ‘There are huge implications regionally.’ Clearly vulture conservation needs to be addressed at a regional level if it is to have a positive impact on the birds’ wellbeing.
Deliberate Poisoning
Traditional beliefs ‘Today people are poisoning vultures to trade their parts in the muti markets,’ says Wolter. The demand for vulture parts for use in traditional beliefs – muti or juju depending on where you come from – is contributing to the birds’ decline. ‘There are certainly a lot of Cape vultures going into the muti trade in Limpopo province [South Africa] – you’re looking at maybe 50 fledglings a year that could potentially end up in the trade.
‘The muti trade in KwaZulu-Natal is also a massive problem. That’s one reason why the white-backed vulture population has been uplisted: masses of white-backs are being killed at these sites. And it’s difficult to know what to do,’ she continues. ‘You can’t really educate against traditional beliefs. It would be the same as telling somebody that they can’t believe in God.’
Incidents aren’t restricted to South Africa. ‘There is a major trade in vulture parts throughout West Africa for traditional practices,’ says Botha. In Nigeria, the pressure on hooded vultures is so intense that the country acts as a sink for species across the region. ‘The demand for vultures and vulture parts in Nigeria is now so high that people are being paid to source the birds from elsewhere in West Africa and bring them in for the trade,’ Botha believes. ‘And, although the muti trade isn’t considered big in East Africa, we also have reports from people in Tanzania who have raided poachers’ camps and found piles of bags of vulture heads and feet [the most widely used parts in the trade].’
Poachers Poachers also kill vultures, simply for being vultures. The birds indicate the location of a carcass – and give away the poachers’ position. ‘People are trying to kill vultures for no other reason than to get rid of them,’ Wolter says bluntly.
Botha provides some more specific examples. ‘On the Mozambican side of the Kruger, 68 vultures were killed at a rhino carcass in 2011. I think the main purpose of these poisonings is to eliminate vultures from the environment as they indicate the presence of poached carcasses to rangers. But the poachers have now worked out that there is a commercial value to vulture parts as well. That obviously presents an even bigger threat to the birds.’
That’s exactly what happened in Gonarezhou last year. After the elephant’s ivory had been removed, the poisoned carcass proved a ready source of vulture parts as the birds succumbed too. ‘We’re obviously concerned about the knock-on effects of elephant poaching on vulture populations,’ he adds.
Bushmeat ‘An unusual fact about hooded vultures, one that does not apply to any other species, is that they have two different populations – an urban one and a savanna one,’ says Ogada. ‘From West Africa all the way to western Kenya, most of the hooded vultures are urban birds, found at slaughterhouses, rubbish tips, places like that – they’re just like crows there.’ Elsewhere, hooded vultures tend to shun towns and live in savanna landscapes.
‘They are so commensual with humans it should benefit their populations,’ Ogada suggests. ‘But the tables have been turned because of the size of the human population. People are eating them.’
The Price of Power
Electrical powerlines represent a dual threat for vultures: collision and electrocution. ‘The large powerlines are the ones that pose a collision risk,’ says Wolter. ‘The birds don’t see the overhead wire – the very top wire – and they fly into it, and break their legs or wings.
‘With urban growth and development there’s obviously the need for more powerlines and more infrastructure each year, and that is having a hugely negative effect on species like the Cape vulture,’ she continues. ‘I’m talking about all powerlines, even those little T-structures you see everywhere. They are a death trap. If the birds sit on them they get electrocuted straight away.’
Botha agrees. ‘Second only to poisoning, in South Africa at least, the powerline infrastructure is probably the biggest overt and visible mortality factor that affects vultures,’ he says. And it’s not just landing on the lines that causes problems. ‘When the birds defecate they produce what we call a streamer, which is easily two metres long. If streamers touch conductors, even on the big distribution pylons, while they are still attached to the vulture, the bird is electrocuted too.’
South Africa may be Africa’s major powerhouse but, as energy-generating infrastructure across the continent grows, the issue will become an increasing threat. In some cases mitigation measures such as bird flappers, which help large birds to avoid collisions, have been retrofitted. ‘It is a lot more cost-effective to put up bird-friendly structures at the start of a project than being reactive later,’ Wolter points out.
Where the Wind Blows
It’s not only the distribution of electricity, but how it is made that is coming into the spotlight. ‘The main concern we have here is wind turbines,’ maintains Botha. ‘These are quite large and they are placed in areas with good wind energy. There are a number of developments, for instance in Kenya and along the Rift Valley, that are cause for concern. At the moment we are focusing especially on the planned wind energy developments in the Maloti-Drakensberg, predominantly in Lesotho.’
The area is key to the survival of the local bearded vulture population, which has fallen by between a third and a half in the past 50 years and continues to decline. It’s believed that there are only about 350 individuals left, including 100 breeding pairs. In fact, the species has recently been declared Critically Endangered in the region. Sonja Krüger from Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife has been looking closely at the plight of these birds in the light of new energy developments.
‘The Lesotho government has proposed two wind farms comprising 80 turbines in total for the area,’ she says. ‘Those turbines would increase the percentage decline of the population from 1.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent a year. That’s more than double the current rate of decline.’ And her model is modest, given that the final number of turbines could escalate to around 4 000, based on the electrical capacity Lesotho would like to achieve. ‘The field of view of vultures is such that they are generally not looking ahead, they’re looking down for food,’ she explains. ‘So, they see the turbines but they can’t see the turning blades and fly into them.’
What can we do?
To find out more and to support vulture conservation efforts, contact these organisations.
VulPro aims to be the ‘leading vulture conservation programme for advancing knowledge, awareness and innovation’. Based in South Africa, the NGO supports monitoring, rehabilitation and reintroduction programmes, www.vulpro.com
The Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Sasol Vulture Monitoring Project observes vulture populations across the southern African subcontinent, www.ewtorg.za
The Peregrine Fund works to conserve birds of prey worldwide, www.peregrinefund.org
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