Werner Menges and Carmen Honey
17 January 2008
TWENTY-FIVE rare birds of prey - including two dozen vultures - were found poisoned in the Aminuis area south of Gobabis over the weekend in one of the worst cases of bird poisoning in Namibia in years.
According to Lovness Ndeiweda, a Pupil Warden in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism at Gobabis, a dog belonging to a farmer in the Aminuis communal area ate poison and died while out in the veld looking for cattle with its owner on Friday evening.
The owner notified the Environment Ministry, and when the incident was investigated on Saturday, 12 vultures were spotted where they had gathered to feed on the dead dog.
The birds, too, had been poisoned.
In all, 23 white-backed vultures (Gyps africanus), one lappet-faced vulture (Aegypius tracheliotos), and one tawny eagle (Aquila rapax) were found dead from poisoning on Saturday in the area where the dog had died.
These species are all classified as vulnerable due to low or declining numbers, according to the authoritative publication 'Roberts Birds of Southern Africa'.
"This is why poisoning should not happen," Liz Komen of the Namibia Animal Rehabilitation Research & Education Centre (Narrec) near Windhoek told The Namibian yesterday.
She said according to information provided to her, residents of the Aminuis communal area found workers employed at a commercial farm adjacent to the communal area putting out poisoned bait on both sides of the fence between commercial farmland and the communal land next to it.
It is not ethical to place poison even near a boundary fence like that, she said.
It is suspected that the dog had eaten some of the poisoned bait, and that after it had died, the vultures and eagle came to feed on its carcass, Komen said.
The birds were in turn killed by secondary poisoning, she said.
Ndeiweda said the workers reported that they were acting under instructions from their employer and that the aim was to poison jackals in the area.
Poison however is a notoriously indiscriminate killer - as the deaths of the vultures, eagle and dog again demonstrate.
It has been reported that for every jackal or target animal killed through poisoning, 100 to 300 animals not intended to be killed can also be poisoned and killed.
Ndeiweda said another dog had also been killed with poison under the same circumstances in the same area recently.
It may be possible that problem dogs may have been the target of the poisoning, Komen said, remarking that communal farmers should also be warned that it is unfair to allow their dogs to roam freely onto neighbouring farms.
Ndeiweda said farmers who want to resort to poisoning to deal with problem predators should first get a recommendation from the Ministry of Environment to take this route, as well as advice on how to use the poison.
Komen said the birds killed in this poisoning, which is the worst case of its kind to be reported in Namibia in recent years, can all be considered rare: "All large birds of prey are rare and all are in decline."
She said some of the bait recovered from the area would be tested to establish what type of poison had been used.
The dead birds were yesterday taken to the State Veterinary Laboratory in Windhoek, where they were to be studied.
According to the Namibia Nature Foundation's Raptors Namibia working group, Namibia's lappet-faced vulture population is estimated to consist of only 500 breeding pairs of birds, with this number declining.
White-backed vultures are more abundant in Namibia, and their local population has been estimated at about 10 000 birds.
Raptors Namibia classifies the tawny eagle as endangered in Namibia, with a maximum of 1 400 birds of this species estimated to be found in the country and their numbers suspected to have declined by some 63 per cent in Namibia over the last 20 years.
The numbers of both these vulture species and tawny eagles are badly affected by the use of poison by Namibian farmers, according to Raptors Namibia.
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