Unfortunately, vultures are now at risk of disappearing from the African landscape.
Soon after Clive Vivier helped drive the creation of the Zululand Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) in April 2019last year, he received a call that a vulture had been poisoned. Over the next few weeks, three more vultures would be poisoned in separate incidents in the region in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
“I said, ‘to hell with this we’ve got to do something’,” recalls Vivier, the owner of Leopard Mountain Lodge in the Manyoni Private Game Reserve.
He and his team raised a R50 000 reward for anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of a vulture poacher. But it wasn’t enough.
“Yet we were poisoning them ourselves with lead ammunition and that drove me nuts. I realised that we’ve got to tackle all the levels, not just the people trying to poach vultures for muti by putting out poisoned carcasses.”
Vivier began to investigate the use of lead-free ammunition in hunting and culling and contacted Linda van den Heever, the vulture project manager at BirdLife South Africa.
“Linda came down and gave us a presentation ... She said, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if for International Vulture Awareness Day we could have a Vulture Safe Zone?’ In the last 60 days, it’s just blossomed and both of us got out and managed to achieve it.”
Vivier and a group of private landowners in the region have now committed to managing their properties as Vulture Safe Zones, to help threatened vulture populations stabilise and thrive.
The Zululand region in northern KwaZulu-Natal supports five of South Africa’s nine vulture specie and is an important breeding area, particularly for the tree-nesting white-backed vulture.
Covering the length of the Zululand IBA, the Zululand Vulture Safe Zone stretches from Pongola Game Reserve in the north to the borders of the Mkuze section of iSimangaliso National Park in the east, bound by the N2 highway to the east.
The establishment of the safe zone, says Van den Heever, “will go a long way towards minimising threats to vultures that are perfectly preventable”.
Some landowners provide food for the vultures at supplementary feeding sites. “A mobile chat group is used to monitor the whereabouts of the birds, and to manage a co-ordinated feeding programme in the hopes that a consistent supply of food will minimise the lure of carcasses laced with poison by poachers,” Van den Heever explains.
“In addition, they will now ensure that carcasses and gut piles put out at so-called ‘vulture restaurants’ are lead-and contaminant-free, that water reservoirs are fitted with ‘escape’ ladders to prevent drownings, and that lead-free ammunition is used for hunting and culling.”
Select staff members will receive poison response training, powerlines will be monitored and nesting vultures will be kept free of disturbance.
By feeding on the carcasses of dead animals, vultures perform one of nature’s most important tasks. “Without the ecosystem services they provide, carcasses would be left to rot, attracting less specialised scavengers, such as jackals, rats and feral dogs. This can then create the ideal circumstances for the spread of diseases, such as rabies and canine distemper.”
Yet the country’s vulture populations face an uncertain future. Three of the nine vulture species, including the once-numerous white-backed vulture, are now critically endangered. “As consumers of carrion, vultures are vulnerable to poisons, falling victim not only to unscrupulous poachers who target them deliberately, but also to livestock farmers who kill them inadvertently when targeting mammalian predators.”
Gut piles and carcasses, put out for scavengers to consume, may contain fragments of lead and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which are lethal to vultures.
Collisions with, and electrocutions on, power-lines are a major culprit in vulture declines, as does direct persecution and inadvertent disturbance of breeding vultures at their colonies.
Conservation efforts, says Van den Heever, are often hampered by the ecology of vultures themselves as they can travel vast distances in search of food, undeterred by borders. “Unfortunately, vultures are now at risk of disappearing from the African landscape.”
To save vultures, landscape-level conservation initiatives are needed, not only in nature reserves and national parks, but also on privately-owned land that supports populations. “First conceptualised and applied in Asia, where vulture numbers were decimated by the veterinary drug diclofenac, Vulture Safe Zones cover vast stretches of privately-owned land that are managed in ways that conducive to vulture survival.”
Modelled on the Multi-species Action Plan to Conserve African-Eurasian Vultures, safe zones in Africa are being adapted to “address the unique and multifaceted challenges facing the continent’s vultures”.
In SA, one Vulture Safe Zone has been formally declared at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. “However, there are several projects under way,” she says. “The Endangered Wildlife Trust in working on projects in the Karoo and Lowveld. We are also working on projects in the Waterberg and around Kimberley. Then there’s a prospective trans-boundary project about to be launched around the Limpopo River, which will be a collaboration between several NGOs from South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe.”
Vultures, says Vivier, may be perceived as ugly, but they are beautiful birds. “I’ll fight anybody for vultures. It’s so horrible to kill innocent birds that do nothing to us but do a lot for us.”
He’s a “little bit crazy”, he laughs. “I believe that we should be protecting our wildlife. I tend to be a grandfather and I like to see things done, because I can’t believe we cannot have vultures around for our grandchildren.
“The good news is that through this process ... we are going to have tothe opportunity to put this lead-free ammunition out for the benefit of 45 000 hunters in SA. We’ll be able to give them a cheaper alternative and save vultures.”