Poaching, poisoning and other hazards took on vanishing vultures of Africa. A new study suggests that the carrion was also threatened by another danger — poisonous bullets of lead that they ingest while eating animal carcasses, made by legal hunters.
One-third of the nearly 600 white-backed vultures caught and tested in Botswana “elevated levels” of lead in their blood, and higher concentrations of lead were found in vultures during hunting season and hunting farms, according to a study published last month in science of the total environment journal.
African vultures are in danger of the owners of livestock that are poisoning carcasses to kill predators such as lions and from poachers, which contaminate the carcass for target birds overhead, circling can attract the Rangers. However, the study’s lead Author, said there should be more scrutiny of the impact of lead poisoning on African vultures and to use alternatives such as copper ammunition.
“She really was not recognized as a possible threat in Africa,” said Arkady, Konstantin Fedor Garbett, an employee of the predators of Botswana the group and a graduate student at the University of Cape town in South Africa.
Botswana banned Hunting on public land in 2014, although it remains in private households. Neighbouring South Africa is creating the most revenue from regulated hunting on the continent. Kenya has banned legal hunting in 1977, the country lost wildlife poachers.
Lead ammunition can fragment into many small pieces after entering the flesh. Scientists have previously reported on the risks to the health of people and animals from eating animals shot with lead bullets. A study of Botswana has recognized the particular vulnerability of recent research that points to condors C and a relative tolerance of some vultures, although Garbett said some respondents vultures were sluggish.
“Sometimes after captures, instead, to fly at once, they will stick out and act like they don’t know what to do,” she said.
Lead poisoning from bullets, preventing the recovery of the endangered California Condor in the United States, despite the prohibitions on the use of such ammunition in the habitat of the Condor, according to a 2012 report by environmental toxicologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
White-backed African vultures are listed as threatened with extinction.
The South African hunters and conservation Association the game expects more data on lead levels in the vultures and will make recommendations to member States on lead ammunition, said Gerhard Verdoorn, President of the Association. However, Verdoorn said that he and his friends are concerned about the threat and stopped using lead ammunition for hunting long ago. Alternative munitions contains small amounts of lead, which will not burst into small pieces inside shot the animal, he said.
Any government considering banning lead ammunition for hunting,” undoubtedly, the question about the potential impact of these levels of influence on populations of vultures,” said Darcy Ogada, assistant Director of Africa programs for the Peregrine Fund, an American band. Still, the studies in Botswana carried out in the period from 2012 to 2015, “a little-known threat in Africa and one that is much more easily overlooked,” said Ogada, who was not involved in the study.
Vultures are more vulnerable to ingestion of lead from ammunition than birds of prey, such as falcons, hawks and eagles, which often do their own hunting, said Verdoorn, President of the hunting Association. The vultures, he said, “the end of the food chain”.
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