Vultures don’t get much love in the world. Their very name has negative connotations when applied to human behavior. Eagles may soar, but their cousin the vulture unappealingly scavenges the dead. Yet, the vulture fills a critical niche in nature.
…they don’t have the long elegant legs of waders or the candy-colored charisma of tropical birds – no, they have the hunched shoulders of a leering, hand-rubbing old man and a bald face with which to better insert their heads and necks into the steaming entrails of a carcass. But they are incredibly designed creatures who are an integral part of the ecosystem…
Vultures are nature’s clean-up crew. They routinely strip dead animal carcasses in less than an hour. Their digestive systems neutralize toxins from the dead animal which also removes the toxins from the environment. If vultures aren’t around to do this dirty work, other more problematic species step in, often with dire results.
…following the decline of vultures, India experienced a strong uptick in feral dogs – by an estimated seven million. The increase in dogs, potentially feeding on disease-ridden carcasses, is thought to have at least partially caused the rabies outbreak that was estimated to have killed 48,000 people from 1992-2006 in India – deaths that may have been avoided if not for the disappearance of vultures.
In Africa the rate of the vulture’s decline has accelerated in the last four years, leading to several critical status changes last October.
…four species of African vultures were up-listed to critically endangered, and two species were up-listed to endangered status on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN’s) Red List.
One of the main drivers in this acceleration is the increased use of poison by poachers. Quiet and extremely lethal, poison is being used to bring down elephants and rhinos. The poison kills both the elephant and the vultures when they gather to prey on the carcass. Poachers also add poison to the dead animal’s meat in order to kill the vultures whose gathering could alert game keepers to the poacher’s presence.
Between 2012 and 2014, 155 elephants and 2 044 vultures were killed in 11 poaching-related incidents in seven African countries. The number of vulture fatalities associated with each ivory poaching incident is more than 30 times that recorded in other poisoning incidents since 2012.
In September last year [2015] 46 white-backed vultures as well as an elephant were killed in a poisoning incident in the northern parts of the Kruger National Park.
Chunks of meat were removed from various parts of the elephant’s carcass, and the poison Temik spread on the exposed areas. The vultures then descended on the carcass and as a result were poisoned.
In Limpopo, 65 vultures were found dead on a farm near the confluence of the Blyde and Olifants rivers in May last year [2015]. Sixty-four of those vultures were from globally endangered species.Vulture populations were under significant pressure prior to the explosion of poacher related poisoning. The vulture has never had the kind of conservation constituency that follows the big cats, elephants or rhinos. Yet, the vulture faces the same threats from the encroachment of humans. Failing to understand the vulture’s true value to ecosystem will have dire consequences for more than the vulture.
We may have a cultural bias against cackling scavengers, but it’s time to learn to love vultures. They are certainly not without their charms – they form monogamous pairs, they divide labor well and they’re social. The have awesome collective names like "a wake of vulture," or "committee," or "venue." They rarely kill other creatures, and here’s where their value is immeasurable; they subsist entirely on the already-dead meat of other animals, and in doing so, they provide an incredibly quick cleanup of killed animal carcasses.
Vulturing isn't all hard work. Gomez is a young white backed vulture abandoned at the Naankuse Conservation Center in Namibia. Apparently, he would rather hang around the pool than do any carcass ripping. He arrived at Naankuse as a fluffy juvenile. Now volunteers at the center are working to improve his wing and grip strength so that he can be introduced into a breeding wake on Naankuse's reserve.
Other conservation groups working to protect vultures include:
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