Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 52
E N V I RO NM EN T
GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe makes the scavenger
bird a metaphor for the evil of a concentration camp.
N HIS POEM “VULTURES,”
Yesterday they picked
white-headed vulture is a critically endangered species,
with only about 5,500 individuals left in the wild.
Many vulture species are social animals—picture a
kettle of vultures sharing a meal of a buffalo carcass,
joining one another for a snack, and nesting together as
a colony. But the rare, white-headed vulture is solitary,
almost shy. It prefers to fly and feed in smaller groups,
and a brooding couple will often build a nest only for
itself and tuck it away on the top of a baobab tree.
“They build a nest cup lined with grasses, and then
they reinforce it along the edges with a thick ring of
sticks,” says Rebecca Bishop, a Boise State University
graduate student who has been on the hunt for these
solitary nests in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National
Park for the past couple of years. “White-headed vultures are so rare and understudied that we still lack
basic natural history knowledge pertaining to the species, which is unusual in 2023,” she says. “So, we’ve got
a gap where we don’t completely understand a species
in drastic decline.”
That’s where her research on the breeding ecology
comes in. By surveying nests and their locations in
Gorongosa and working to characterize them, Bishop
and other researchers are creating the baseline data
needed to follow the species both in the park and in
other ecosystems.
Given how rare white-headed vultures are, Bishop
was surprised to find so many of their nests hidden
away in Gorongosa’s plentiful baobab trees. “My first
season, I actually went and collected data on 13 whiteheaded nests,” she says. When she came back the following year, in 2022, she used a drone to get a better
view of the canopy and found even more. “Just the fact
that we’ve got such a high density of nesting whiteheaded vultures is really impressive,” says Bishop. “I
went to a conference in Zimbabwe last fall and talked
to other vulture researchers from Africa. In West Africa,
specifically, they note maybe two white-headed vulture
nests in some national parks.”
the eyes of a swollen
corpse in a water-logged
trench and ate the
things in its bowel.
Vultures are almost never described affectionately
in literature. Instead, they serve as grotesque symbols
of the hollowness of death, of exploitation, of benefits
gained only by the misfortune of others. In short, vultures give us the ick. And that feeling of general disgust sometimes affects how people think about vulture
research and conservation.
But no matter how we collectively feel about vultures, researchers are sure we’re going to miss them
when they’re gone. Despite their gross reputation, vultures serve as the janitors of the bush.
People often think that vultures transmit disease
since they feed on carrion, but the opposite is true.
If a cow or an antelope should die in a forest or on
a savanna, vultures swoop in, pick clean the bones,
and then eat the bones, too, all in a couple of hours,
says Ethiopian biologist Alazar Daka Ruffo, a consultant for Bird Life International. Even if that cow
died of anthrax or hoof-and-mouth, the vulture could
digest it and emerge unscathed. Vultures perform
the critical function of waste removal and disposal of
carcasses that might otherwise spread bacteria and
pathogens. At abattoirs near Addis Ababa, where Ruffo
studies vultures, the birds feed on offal and viscera.
“They are employees who aren’t paid a salary,” Ruffo
says jokingly.
But vulture populations across Africa are crashing.
Scientists estimate that populations of several species of vultures in Africa declined by an average of
62 percent over the past 30 years.¹ Among them, the
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