Vulture populations in a single of Africa's most important wildlife reserves have declined by 60%, say scientists. home
The researchers suggest the decline of vultures in Kenya's Masai Mara is becoming driven by poisoning.
The US-based Peregrine Fund says farmers sometimes lace the bodies of dead cattle or goats using a poisonous pesticide known as furadan.
This seems to become aimed at carnivores that kill the livestock, but a person carcass can poison up to 150 vultures.
Munir Virani, who is director of your Peregrine Fund's Africa programmes, has known as for use of furadan to become banned within the region "to preserve these keystone members of your scavenging community".
"People could think about vultures as unsightly and disgusting, but the birds are vital for the ecosystem," he says.
Their taste for carrion actually tends to make them the landscape's clean-up team - ensuring the region is just not littered with bodies, helping include the spread of disorder and recycling nutrients.
The results of this latest survey of vultures are published within the journal Biological Conservation.
The terrible implications of a vulture population crash have previously been demonstrated in the course of a circumstance that grew to become generally known as the Asian vulture crisis.
Populations of Gyps vultures particularly, in South Asia, crashed by over 95% over just a couple years within the 1990s, primarily mainly because farmers handled their cattle using the pain-killing drug diclofenac.
The pain-killer, it turned out, was lethal towards the vultures, which fed on the dead cattle.
As well as driving three species of vulture towards the brink of extinction, the crisis supplied a huge amount of meals for wild canines, which moved in to get the put of your birds.
This had the devastating side-effect of rising the spread of rabies. And Dr Virani is concerned that a similar scenario could happen in Kenya.
The remedy in Africa though, could possibly be a lot more easy than in South Asia.
By boosting the general public image of vultures within the region, the Peregrine Fund hopes to stop individuals from carrying out these "revenge poisoning attacks".
Involving 2003 and 2005, Dr Virani and his colleagues drove throughout the expansive Kenyan landscapes, counting vultures.
He and his colleagues then in comparison the outcomes of these surveys using the results of surveys carried out within the 1980s. The comparison uncovered a 60% decline in vultures.
Corinne Kendall's do the job has taken this survey a step further.
Ms Kendal is often a researcher from Princeton University within the US, who has also been functioning using the Peregrine Fund - tracking and monitoring the birds to investigate the extent of your poisoning.
"We connected the GPS trackers like minor backpacks," she tells BBC News. "There's a piece that sits on their chest and two loops approximately each and every wing."
"But we had four from 16 vultures killed within the initial year and three of these were confirmed scenarios of poisoning.
"From a sample of 16, it's hard to understand how consultant that is certainly, but it's particularly worrying."
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