Vulture populations in a single of Africa's most important wildlife reserves have declined by 60%, say scientists. home
The researchers advise that the decline of vultures in Kenya's Masai Mara is becoming driven by poisoning.
The US-based Peregrine Fund says farmers occasionally lace the bodies of useless cattle or goats having a toxic pesticide named furadan.
This appears to be aimed at carnivores that destroy the livestock, but one particular carcass can poison as much as 150 vultures.
Munir Virani, who is director of your Peregrine Fund's Africa programmes, has named for use of furadan to be banned from the area "to preserve these keystone members of your scavenging community".
"People may well consider vultures as ugly and disgusting, but the birds are important for the ecosystem," he says.
Their taste for carrion actually makes them the landscape's clean-up staff - guaranteeing the area is just not littered with bodies, assisting contain the spread of sickness and recycling nutrients.
The outcomes of this most recent survey of vultures are published from the journal Biological Conservation.
The horrible implications of a vulture population crash have currently been demonstrated all through a circumstance that grew to become generally known as the Asian vulture crisis.
Populations of Gyps vultures particularly, in South Asia, crashed by over 95% over just a couple years from the 1990s, principally mainly because farmers treated their cattle together with the pain-killing drug diclofenac.
The pain-killer, it turned out, was lethal towards the vultures, which fed within the useless cattle.
As well as driving three species of vulture towards the brink of extinction, the crisis offered a massive amount of food for wild canines, which moved in to get the put of your birds.
This had the devastating side-effect of rising the spread of rabies. And Dr Virani is involved that a similar scenario could come about in Kenya.
The resolution in Africa although, could be far more easy than in South Asia.
By boosting the public picture of vultures from the nation, the Peregrine Fund hopes to stop individuals from carrying out these "revenge poisoning attacks".
Amongst 2003 and 2005, Dr Virani and his colleagues drove throughout the expansive Kenyan landscapes, counting vultures.
He and his colleagues then compared the results of these surveys together with the outcomes of surveys carried out from the 1980s. The comparison revealed a 60% decline in vultures.
Corinne Kendall's function has taken this survey a step additional.
Ms Kendal is often a researcher from Princeton College from the US, that has also been functioning together with the Peregrine Fund - tracking and monitoring the birds to research the extent of your poisoning.
"We attached the GPS trackers like tiny backpacks," she tells BBC Information. "There's a piece that sits on their chest and two loops close to each and every wing."
"But we had 4 from sixteen vultures killed from the initial yr and three of these had been confirmed scenarios of poisoning.
"From a sample of sixteen, it really is hard to understand how consultant that may be, but it really is really worrying."
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