Vulture Crisis in Africa and the World

White backed Vulture in Flight, Masai Mara Kenya

Lets face it Vultures are not really on peoples favorite animal or bird list, but primarily because they are very miss-understood birds, who play a very important and vital role in our environment and not just here in Africa but also in the rest of the world. 

The Pan-African Ornithological Congress was recently held in Arusha from the 14th-21st October 2012,  http://www.paoc-africa.org/about-us/  it is held in different parts of Africa every 4 years. One of the days was mainly dedicated to raptors and Vultures in general. It was fascinating but also utterly scary to listen about Vultures and in how much trouble they are in and that their numbers have plummeted dramatically, it is also here were one realizes how important Vultures are to have around.

Two of the speakers Darcy Ogada and Munir Virani spoke about serious declines in Vulture numbers in Africa and in South Asia, both are involved in Vulture/Raptor research and conservation together with, The Peregrine Fund, you can check out the website here. You can also read Darcy's article Dropping Dead: causes and consequences of vulture population declines worldwide here as well as some other articles. You can also read some notes from the field by Munir Virani here.

Scenes like these, might become a thing of the past.

I'm sure we all heard at some point that Vultures are seriously threatened, but we never realized how serious it actually is where now almost 14 of 23 vulture species worlwide are threatened with extinction that's 61% of our vulture species. Asia, a vulture rich area has experienced an almost 96% decline in their vulture numbers. The decline of vultures in Asia has many reasons but  the main reasons are deliberate persecution, shooting and harassment but the main one is poisoning, through eating contaminated carcases. Cattle in South Asia are injected with the anti-inflammatory drug called Diclofenac, cattle in the Hindu culture are sacred and there for not slaughtered but left outside to dye, vultures feed on these contaminated carcasses, causing renal (kidney) failure, killing the vultures in the end. The lack of vultures at carcasses have also lead to carcasses taking much longer to decompose and the number of mammalian carnivores at feeding sites have increased. Because there are now so many mammalian scavengers at a carcass the spread of disease like Rabies and K9 distemper between mammals are high resulting in enormous health care costs in humans, treating rabies.

Decrease in vultures could lead to more mammalian scavengers, making it easy to spread disease.

        

The situation in Africa is just as critical, but unlike Asia gets very little attention from authorities, government and the media. The vultures in Africa face many threats, habitat loss, killings for witchcraft, lack of food, high voltage/power lines, wind farms and harassment but the two main reasons are poisoning and human persecution.

In North Africa vultures are pretty much non existent, in West Africa the problem is killings for the use of vulture parts in witchcraft and they have experienced a 95% decline in large vulture numbers, and Uganda has experienced a 65% decline. In East Africa the killings of vultures are due to the poisoning of carcasses with the pesticide poison called Furadan. Carcasses are poisoned with the intention to kill and get rid of cattle killing predators like Hyenas and Lions, but vultures feed on these carcasses as well and they can kill hundreds of vultures in one sitting, In September this year a report came out of Zimbabwe, where an Elephant carcass was poisoned and lead to the single killing of 183 vultures. The direct poisoning and killing of vultures will also have a huge affect on the success of future breeding of vultures as they have some of the lowest reproduction rates among birds and so their populations are extremely vulnerable to high mortality rates. 

           Large vultures in the family gyps has experienced huge declines in Asia and Africa

What we all learned that day is that something serious needs to be done to conserve vultures in Africa and the rest of the world, according to researchers, the following needs to happen in Africa to secure the future of our vultures. (a) There needs to be more serious penalties for offenders (b) There needs to be better control and bans on certain poisons and pesticides (c) There needs to be more public awareness of the situation of our vultures (d) the local governments need to get more involved and show support (e) Better and well trained staff in the field.

A very rare sight in the Serengeti last week, Egyptian Vulture!

So the next time you follow vultures to a lion kill, or see them feeding in the Serengeti on dead Wildebeest, take some time to explain to your guests the situation Vultures are in and how important it is to make sure that they are still around for a long long time !!