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By Nokuthaba Dlamini for Vic Falls Live
A leading African conservation organization is studying ways to use technology to curb vulture poisoning in Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park and Limpopo National Park in Mozambique.
The two game reserves are said to be hardest hit by vulture poisoning.
The Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), which is committed to preserving threatened species and ecosystems in southern and east Africa, says it will use vultures as its “eye in the sky” to warn of poisoning incidents.
Data would be transmitted from GPS-tracked vultures and sent to monitors, allowing for faster response to potentially deadly incidents.
“The problem is exacerbated by the poisoning of vultures as sentinels in connection with the ivory trade and other poaching practices, as well as the targeting of these birds for trade in their body parts for faith purposes,” said Andre Botha, the Vultures for Africa program manager at EWT.
“Vultures are being targeted as their visible presence descends from the sky in large numbers and roosts near or feeds on poached wildlife to alert law enforcement personnel to poaching or poisoning incidents.
“Their remarkable sentinel function has led to widespread persecution of vultures across the continent.”
Gareth Tate, Birds of Prey program manager at the EWT, said the technology will result in a faster response to poisoning incidents.
“When a vulture is killed at a poisoning scene, the immobility sets off an alarm essentially within minutes of death, allowing us to locate the spots where vultures died and quickly respond and decontaminate the scenes to prevent further loss of vultures and other animals that would otherwise go undetected or be discovered too late,” Tate said.
“It’s sad that vultures have to die to recognize some of these events, but by sending an early warning signal to us, they save the lives of countless other wildlife and allow us to save animals that survived these poisoning events.”
Deborah Kahatano, party leader of USAID’s VukaNow activity, which supports EWT innovation, said one of her key goals is to increase the application of effective tools, technologies and approaches to curbing wildlife crime while working closely with communities to support them address these issues.
“The vision for this work is to expand the network of GPS-tracked vultures across venom hotspots across Africa and involve multiple partners and landscapes to adopt the Eye in the Sky venom detection system while continuing to focus on additional proactive.” Safeguards focused to address the problem of large indiscriminate poisoning threats,” Kahatano said.
“This includes conducting community work and targeted workshops with practitioners of traditional medicine to raise awareness of the use of venoms to remove body parts from vultures and their risks to human health, and to allow for an improved judicial and law enforcement response , leading to more arrests.”
The first Saturday of September marks International Vulture Awareness Day, which aims to highlight the protection of vultures, which face a range of threats.
This article is reproduced here as part of the African Conservation Journalism Program funded in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe by USAID’s VukaNow: Activity. Run by the international conservation organization Space for Giants, it aims to expand the reach of conservation and environmental journalism in Africa and bring more African voices into the international conservation debate. Written articles from the Mozambican and Angolan cohorts will be translated from Portuguese. Broadcast stories remain in their original language.
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