According to Walinzi Wildlife Protection Unit Director Darryl Shaun Milner, traditional healers believed that sleeping with a vulture’s head gave a person clairvoyant powers and the ability to predict sports scores, Lotto numbers and the like.

‘This poaching was definitely intentional poaching for muti reasons ‘,he said.

The carcasses were found on Friday November 20, by a group of volunteers called the Letaba Ranch Honorary Rangers which is headed up by Lutz Otto.

Otto said they had found 22 poisoned vultures.

The carcasses were found hidden in a drainage line.

Their heads, gillets, chests and most of their feet were removed. He said he had observed no tags.  The white backed vultures were killed with parts of a buffalo carcass laced with poison that was strategically positioned in a clearing on a crest of a hill to kill them.

Milner said the buffalo were caught in snares and once they had died, the poachers butcher the buffalo and poison the meat which they then place in a high open area for the vultures to see.

‘ The vultures then eat the poisoned meat which kills them close by as it has a very quick reaction’, said Milner.

He said poachers used poison because it was quick and also did not damage the vulture.

According to Milner this was the first time that vulture carcasses had been found on this particular reserve.

‘ There has been a huge national increase with Vulture Poaching as a whole, all over South Africa. The general public do not concentrate on vulture poachers and/or do not know about it as the Vulture is not classified as a “high end” species such as the rhino’, said Milner.

He said farmers needed to be more educated about vultures and how to deal with them as well as how to prevent poachers on their land.

‘More security needs to be introduced on the farms and the security should not only focus on specific species such as the rhino etc. Live stock farmers have also been known to poison vultures as they put out a carcass of an animal which they poison to kill off animals such as the jackal, but unfortunately vultures also eat the carcass and are then poisoned and die, it was not the case in this incident though’, he added.

According to Milner, Otto, who headed up the Letaba Ranch Honorary rangers, got groups of volunteers to join him for weekends at Letaba Ranch National Park to help do Anti Poaching patrols to collect snares as LRNP ( Letaba Ranch National Park) had a huge problem with snare poaching for meat.

He said just this year, they had collected more than 250 snares.

Otto said based on the severity of this problem Dr Gerhard Verdoorn and Andre Botha from the EWT were immediately contacted.

He said this was the third separate poisoning that he was aware of this year.

‘ An increase of this activity is extremely concerning – Besides they serve negative consequence on an already endangered species, this poison if not controlled, continues to work through the ecosystem as it indiscriminately kills particularly predators, omnivores and scavengers’, he concluded.