Poachers track and murdered Elephants, PYTHONS, cheetahs, leopards, rhinos plus lions for their different body parts. And because of the demand for elephant tusks plus rhino horns within Japan, China, Vietnam as well as Taiwan the bad fellas are currently hunting and murdering vultures to mask their trails.
With the increased battle against poachers across Africa these criminals consider vultures as their number one enemies since their presence notifies park rangers the place where the carcass is found Vultures gather and hover up in the sky as much as 10 miles over a killing through using their strong eyes that have a good telephoto vision mechanism that assists them identify a killing in the midst of the open wide savannah where a human eye can’t match this unique ability.
‘tumbusi’ is the Kiswahili term for a vulture and their big wings assist them to dive down at a great speed of up to 18 miles-per-hour transmitting powerful waves that signals to others that could be up in the sky as far as 20 miles away. The Vultures clean the natural savannah through eating the remnants of hundreds of wildlife that dies because of natural causes like ageing.
about one hundred vultures can devouring the remains of a dead African buffalo that weighs about 1,000 kgs and may finish it in just a couple of minutes.
The bones they leave behind are later ground to tiny dust particles by some bacteria in so doing enriching the earth. This consequently makes vultures really useful in the overall natural process of environment cleaning than hyenas or even jackals which rely on their noses to sniff the carcasses and even spend several hours looking for the dead prey in the wide open wilderness.
According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – IUCN the extensive killing of vultures began in Asia in the early 1990s and had disastrous effects in these countries like India where over Sixty million vultures by the close of the year 1990 has been killed reducing their population to nearly none. In the two decades approximately 1,500 pairs of breeding vultures have unfortunately been killed within South Africa.
What poachers did was to poison vegetables plus bread that kill the buffaloes plus zebras. In the long run, the vultures fed on the poisonous carcasses and also fed their little chicks producing a massive death of the vultures in South Africa.
Nearly two years back in Tanzania; over 8 elephants were discovered dead close to Manyara National Park with their tusks efficiently removed from their carcasses showing that they were actually poisoned with a mixture of chemicals prior to removing their tusks. The number of vultures that might have been poisoned from eating the carcass of these elephants hasn’t really yet established.
Tanzanians do not like or even feel sorry for with vultures as many of us consider these birds as very unattractive, however their absence within Ngorongoro, Tarangire as well as Mikumi, plus other leading tourist attraction will result into an increase in house flies within the game parks making them very dangerous areas for tourists as well as resulting into Tanzania lossing its foreign currency.