Effort to save African birds

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Adult hornbills are striking in appearance and are culturally important. Picture: TheGirlsNY, www.flickr.com

Cape Town – These birds are described as “big, black and booming”, but unfortunately their population is anything but blooming.

So, conservationists have initiated a programme to rescue abandoned chicks and hand-rear them in an attempt to boost the population – and the recent donation of a vehicle has helped their efforts enormously, they say. These large, striking-looking birds are the charismatic Southern Ground-Hornbills, culturally important to rural inhabitants of Africa as the “thunder” or “rain” birds and described by conservationists as one of the flagship savannah (bushveld) species.

Sadly, it’s estimated that there are only about 1 500 Southern Ground-Hornbills left in South Africa, of which half are found within the greater Kruger National Park area.

They are classified internationally as “vulnerable” throughout their range in Africa, but within this country they have been listed as “endangered” because their numbers are still declining outside of formally protected areas like Kruger and may be “uplisted” to “critically endangered”.

Major reasons for their declining population are the loss of natural habitat to croplands, bush encroachment, over-grazing and the planting of plantations, the loss of suitable nesting trees, secondary poisoning and electrocution.

Their social structure and slow breeding habits don’t help. Unusually for birds this size – as large as turkeys – they live in social, co-operatively breeding groups that consist of anywhere between two and nine birds (the average size is 3.6), but with only one alpha male and one breeding female per group, with the rest helping.

On average, only one chick is raised to adulthood every nine years.

The Mabula Ground-Hornbill Project, whose partners include UCT’s Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology and the Endangered Wildlife Trust, is working to slow this species’ decline, and their efforts include the harvesting and hand-rearing of “redundant” second-hatched chicks that, under natural conditions in the wild, die of starvation.

Project manager Lucy Kemp explains two eggs are laid at each breeding attempt but the parents can only care for one, abandoning the other.

“The second chick acts as a natural insurance policy to ensure that all the energy put into breeding amounts to something,” she says.

It is this second, redundant chick that is the basis of conservation efforts.

“We take them from wild nests to specialised hand-rearing facilities, and they are later reintroduced back into the wild,” says Kemp. “This reintroduction effort aims to restock areas where the birds have become locally extinct – 60 percent of their natural range – to halt the decline in their numbers, and slowly work towards rebuilding the population to sustainable levels.”

Recently, Imperial Truck Rental donated a vehicle to the project for use during its busiest time of year, which Kemp described as “a godsend”.

“We were able to get the chicks to the hand-rearers as quickly and safely as possible, giving them the very best chance of survival. Thus far, all but two of the 11 harvested chicks have survived and are growing well.” – Cape Argus

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