Durban - A rare Bearded Vulture has been found dead from poison on a cliff face close to its nest near Witsieshoek on the KZN/Free State border.
There are only about 100 breeding pairs of this vulture left in southern Africa.
“Lefuma”, as he was named, had been fitted with a satellite GPS tracking device in August 2012. The adult male was one of 21 Bearded Vultures fitted with this device as part of a project to gather more information on the movements of these birds and to find out the main causes of death.
Last month it was noticed that Lefuma had not moved and a visit to the cliff face revealed the dead bird. An autopsy of the stomach contents showed the vulture died from ingesting Terbufos, a chemical mixture normally used to control crop pests.
“This is so utterly tragic. He was a breeding bird that successfully raised a chick in the past breeding season and, in a month’s time he would have been getting ready for the next breeding season. It is a huge blow for their declining population numbers,” said Sonja Krueger, the park ecologist for Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife’s Maloti-Drakensberg Park and chair of the Bearded Vulture Task Force run by the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT).
Monitoring over the past 10 years has shown that there are only about 100 breeding pairs of these birds left (about 350 individuals) in southern Africa, mostly inside Lesotho.
This was the third recorded death of a Bearded Vulture from poisoning in the past year.
Ten of the tracked birds have died since 2008, of which nine have been poisoned and one died after colliding with a power line.
Of these nine, three have been found in the Free State, two in KZN, two in Lesotho and two in the Eastern Cape.
The Bearded Vulture was recently uplisted to critically endangered status because of the threats to the species in Lesotho and South Africa.
Krueger said she was becoming “more and more fearful” about the plight of vultures in general, noting the two major incidents last year when more than 80 Cape Vultures also died from feeding on poisoned carcasses.
This happened in the Eastern Cape mountains and the Swartberg in southern KZN. Some of the vultures were missing their heads and it is believed these were used for traditional medicine.
In this case, it appeared that pesticide had been placed in a carcass with the purpose of either killing vultures or other scavengers, such as jackal.
“While this happened near the densely populated area of Phuthaditjaba, there is no evidence of this death being attributed to a ‘muti’ killing. It could very easily have come from a farmer”, she said.
“The awful truth is that there might well be more poisoned Bearded Vultures. Unless they have satellite monitoring devices, it is unlikely we will detect other mortalities as they are solitary birds and inhabit such remote regions and their carcasses may be eaten before they are found.
“Already, almost half of our tracked birds have been killed by poison, which paints a very scary picture when extrapolated to the real situation in the population as a whole.” - The Mercury