Poisoning forces vulture decrease in Masai Mara, Kenya

Vulture populations in one of Africa's most significant wildlife reserves have declined by 60%, say scientists. disasters

The researchers propose that the decline of vultures in Kenya's Masai Mara is currently being driven by poisoning.

The US-based Peregrine Fund says farmers sometimes lace the bodies of dead cattle or goats with a poisonous pesticide known as furadan.

This seems to become aimed at carnivores that kill the livestock, but one particular carcass can poison up to one hundred fifty vultures.

Munir Virani, who's director from the Peregrine Fund's Africa programmes, has known as for use of furadan to become banned from the region "to preserve these keystone members from the scavenging community".

"People might think of vultures as ugly and disgusting, however the birds are necessary for that ecosystem," he says.

Their style for carrion in fact tends to make them the landscape's clean-up group - guaranteeing the region isn't littered with bodies, assisting contain the spread of sickness and recycling vitamins.

The results of this most up-to-date survey of vultures are printed from the journal Biological Conservation.

The terrible penalties of a vulture population crash have currently been demonstrated throughout a case that became known as the Asian vulture crisis.

Populations of Gyps vultures particularly, in South Asia, crashed by greater than 95% around just a few years from the 1990s, largely due to the fact farmers treated their cattle using the pain-killing drug diclofenac.

The pain-killer, it turned out, was lethal towards the vultures, which fed within the dead cattle.

Too as driving 3 species of vulture towards the brink of extinction, the crisis furnished a tremendous amount of meals for wild dogs, which moved in to take the spot from the birds.

This had the devastating side-effect of rising the spread of rabies. And Dr Virani is involved that an identical circumstances could occur in Kenya.

The option in Africa though, could be considerably more simple than in South Asia.

By boosting the public image of vultures from the country, the Peregrine Fund hopes to cease folks from carrying out these "revenge poisoning attacks".

In between 2003 and 2005, Dr Virani and his colleagues drove across the expansive Kenyan landscapes, counting vultures.

He and his colleagues then in comparison the results of those surveys using the outcomes of surveys carried out from the 1980s. The comparison revealed a 60% decline in vultures.

Corinne Kendall's work has taken this survey a action further.

Ms Kendal is actually a researcher from Princeton University from the US, who has also been operating using the Peregrine Fund - monitoring and monitoring the birds to research the extent from the poisoning.

"We connected the GPS trackers like little backpacks," she tells BBC News. "There's a piece that sits on their chest and two loops around each wing."

"But we had 4 from sixteen vultures killed from the 1st yr and 3 of those were confirmed circumstances of poisoning.

"From a sample of sixteen, it's challenging to know how representative that may be, but it's very worrying."