Wildlife & Biodiversity

Vultures mostly forage outside protected areas; conservation efforts should be focused there, urges study

New UK study tracked 26 African white-backed vultures fitted with GPS tags for four years over southern Tanzania

 
By Rajat Ghai
Published: Saturday 08 October 2022
The researchers had captured 26 African white-backed vultures (Gyps africanus) at five locations across southern Tanzania. Photo: iStock

Vultures mostly forage outside Protected Areas (PAs). If threats such as poison-laced carcasses are removed from these places, the decline in vulture populations can be stemmed, a study by the University of York in the UK has noted.

The research also found that the birds travelled long distances, with one bird visiting eight countries in southern Africa — Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa and Namibia.

The researchers had captured 26 African white-backed vultures (Gyps africanus) at five locations across southern Tanzania. These were fitted with GPS tags to track their movements. The birds were monitored between 2015 and 2019 using the tracking data from the tags.

African white-backed vultures are most likely to forage early in the day outside National Parks, specifically in Game Reserves and Wildlife Management Areas (WMA), but avoid areas with high livestock numbers to feed,” the study said.                      

A statement on the University of York website dated October 3, 2022 noted:

The study revealed that although vultures spend most of their time in protected areas (64.2 per cent) and stationary (75.5 per cent), when foraging they prefer to use areas outside National Parks, specifically in Game Reserves and Wildlife Management Areas. 

The researchers also found that vultures avoided areas with high livestock density when feeding. This, they said, suggested that vultures did not use cattle as a main food source and avoided areas with high human habitation. 

“Vultures in India also forage mostly out of protected areas. They travel long distances every day while foraging for food,” Rinkita Gurav, manager, Raptor Conservation Programme, WWF-India, told Down To Earth.

She, however, said the second finding of the study regarding cattle not being the main food source of vultures did not hold true for India.

“The drastic crash in vulture populations in India was due to the use of diclofenac in veterinary treatment, mainly on cattle. So clearly, vultures fed on livestock. India being an agrarian country, the livestock population has only increased over the years,” Gurav said.

The researchers also noted the importance of mapping vulture foraging sites:

Our findings that vultures are most likely to forage in game reserves and WMAs emphasise the importance of these areas for anti-poisoning and conflict management efforts and demonstrate the applications of our analysis results.

“Understanding their habitat use, and even more importantly their behaviour while in certain habitats, like outside of protected areas, is thus critical for their conservation,” Corinne Kendall, from North Carolina Zoo and one of the co-authors of the paper, was quoted as saying in the university statement.

Gurav agreed. “Identification and removal of threats near the nesting and roosting sites, making food and water available to them is what needs to be done,” she said.

Combining models for animal tracking: Defining behavioural states to understand space use for conservation was published in the Journal of biogeography September 27, 2022.

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