Blood Safari

10

The centre lay against the lower slopes of the Mariepskop. The mountain, with its forbidding mass of red rock cliffs, was a powerful figure of authority guarding the plains.

Mogale Rehabilitation Centre was displayed in fancy green lettering together with a logo of a raptor’s head and an invitation to enter. Plus a programme:

TIMES OF OUR REHAB TOURS

Mondays to Saturdays:

* 1st Tour starts at 09h30 *2nd Tour starts at 15h00

‘We’re just in time,’ said Emma as she got out to open the gate.

I drove through. Beyond the gate was another notice. Wild Animals. Please remain in your vehicle. Emma got in again. A kilometre further on she said, ‘Look’ and pointed out a swarm of vultures gathering at a carcass. ‘I wonder if they feed the birds here?’

The centre was spread out – cages, gardens, lawns and covered parking for vehicles. Visitors: Please park here. A young man in khaki and green, apparently the standard uniform of the Lowveld, waited impatiently at the gate. We got out.

‘We’re about to start the tour,’ he said, but not in any unfriendly way. He was a head taller than me, with broad shoulders and an athletic self-confidence. Emma’s type.

He led us to a thatched building that was a lecture hall. Several rows of tiered wooden benches descended towards a stage. The audience was already seated, people great and small, with cameras slung around necks and cool drink cans in hand. There was a wilderness scene painted on the wall behind the stage: raptors and vultures in the sky, a leopard, hyenas and buck in the long grass between the thorn trees. The young man positioned himself centre stage. ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Mogale Rehabilitation Centre. My name is Donnie Branca, and I’ll be your guide this morning.’

He looked at us and said, ‘Vultures.’ For an uneasy moment, I thought he was referring to his audience.

‘They’re not cuddly, they’re not cute. As a matter of fact, we think of them as disgusting beasts – squabbling and squawking at a stinking carcass, fighting over decomposing meat. Carrion eaters with beady little eyes, scrawny necks and hooked beaks, often covered in blood and gore and guts up to their eyeballs. Pretty revolting. So most people don’t care much for vultures. Well, let me tell you, here at Mogale, we not only care for them, but we love them. With a passion.’

There was something about the tone and manner of Donnie Branca’s words that was vaguely familiar. He spoke smoothly and easily, with conviction and zeal.

He said vultures were the big game of the feathered kingdom, an indispensable link between mammals and birds in the broad spectrum of nature. They were an ecological necessity, the cleaners of the veld capable of consuming rotting carcasses from head to tail before diseases could incubate that would create havoc up and down the food chain. Vultures were part of the balance, he said, a perfect, delicate balance that had determined the cycle of life in Africa for a hundred thousand years.

‘Until we humans disturbed the balance.’

Branca allowed his words to sink in before continuing. He explained that the problem with vultures was that public and private game reserves could not fence them in. Many birds patrolled areas that were four or five times greater than the Kruger National Park. And that was where the trouble began. They would nest in mountains and valleys, in trees and forests where their ancestors had brooded for thousands of years, but humans had taken over these areas. There was an incorrect perception that vultures preyed on the farmers’ small stock and poultry. So, they were shot.

‘And then there’s the belief among the local people that vultures have magic powers. They believe that vultures have supernatural eyesight that is not only able to find food over vast distances, but is so good that they can actually see tomorrow. In other words, see into the future. Since we started a National Lottery in South Africa, sangomas, as witch doctors prefer to be called, have been selling vulture heads for a small fortune to eager gamblers who believe that they are lucky charms that will enable them to see into the future, their talisman to predict the winning numbers.’

Beside me, Emma was listening with intense concentration.

‘The market for vulture parts has skyrocketed in the past few years. Take a guess what a vulture head is now selling for. Five hundred rand? A thousand bucks? Try ten thousand rand. But the sangomas buy the dead vultures from poachers for maybe two or three hundred rand a piece. And how do the poachers capture the vultures? They poison them. They set out a carcass laced with a deadly poison and they kill a hundred or two hundred birds at once, but they are on foot and they can only carry off ten or twenty, so the others are just left to rot.’

The audience murmured their displeasure, but Donnie Branca was far from finished. He began to quote statistics of losses, every species a learned chorus in English, Afrikaans and Latin. The magnificent bearded vulture/lammergeier/Gypaetus barbatus, which historically nested in the mountains of Lesotho, was entirely extinct in that country. ‘Completely annihilated. Nothing left, not one, not a single bird.’ On the South African side of the border only nine breeding pairs remained. ‘Nine, ladies and gentlemen. Nine.’

I realised of whom the man reminded me. There had been a lay preacher in jail, a born-again armed robber from the Cape Flats by the name of Job Tieties. Bible in hand, he would preach at night, to himself and a handful of approving brothers. His voice carried through the cells with that same urgent, evangelistic fervour.

The Cape vulture/Kransaasvoel/Cryps coprotheres, once so numerous in Africa, was totally wiped out in Swaziland, on the critically endangered list in Namibia, and there remained only two thousand breeding pairs worldwide. ‘Two thousand. Imagine just two thousand people left in the whole world. Just try and imagine that. A century ago, there were one hundred thousand Cape vultures in South Africa. This incredible bird with a wingspan of two and a half metres that can spend the whole day gliding on the thermals over the African veld, covering seven hundred and fifty kilometres effortlessly – that’s the direct distance between Bloemfontein and Cape Town. Just two thousand breeding pairs left. A travesty, a tragedy, a disaster. Why? Why should we worry that they are disappearing, these disgusting, ugly, dirty birds?’

Because nature was a delicate piece of engineering, he said. It was God’s timepiece, where every little gear, every tiny spring, was of vital importance to keep perfect ecological time. ‘Allow me to explain: every vulture had its place, its function, its role to play. Different vultures consumed different parts of the carcass – the body and beak of each was adapted for a specific task. The hooded vulture/Monnikaasvoël/Necrosyrtes monachus would be the first to feed. Its sharper, smaller beak could rip open the hide of the dead animal. It would be a hurried affair in order to snatch a few strips of meat before the larger, dominant scavengers arrived. But it was indispensable; without it the others could not get at the innards.’

The Cape vultures were the riff-raff of carrion. Eternally soaring high above the African veld, they would look for the lions and hyenas, crows, ravens and jackals that would indicate a carcass was ready. Then, they would swoop down in huge flocks, spiralling towards the earth in wide circles and gathering in rowdy bunches close to the feeding ground to be sure it was safe. And so the maul would begin, the great scrum to get at the carcass. Its bald neck marked it as an internal feeder. The giant beak and strong tongue shaped like a trowel would tear out great chunks of meat – it could swallow a kilogram of carrion in three minutes.

‘But the king of the carcass is the lappet-faced vulture/Swar-taasvoël/Aegypius tracheliotos. It stands a metre high.’ He indicated with his hand above the ground. ‘It has a wingspan of almost three incredible metres, just about twice the size of any other vulture, and it does not take shinola from any of them. Lappets can travel up to one thousand, one hundred kilometres through the sky, arrive late at the carcass, and then dominate. But here’s the interesting thing: despite their size and their attitude, they don’t compete for food with other species, because they are specifically adapted to eat the skin and ligaments – and they are the only ones to do so. Isn’t that something?’

Heads nodded in wonder around us. I had to concede; he was good.

Nature wastes nothing, Donnie Branca said. There was even a vulture to clean up the bones: the lammergeier. Frequently, it would be first at a kill, but would wait nervously at the side until there were bones available. Small bits of bone would be swallowed whole: ‘it’s sometimes comical to see the bone go down sideways in the throat’. The lammergeier would take larger bones up into the air and drop them from a great height to shatter on the rocks, so that it could pick them up and swallow them.

‘If we poison them, if Escom’s power cables kill them when they dive into them, if the farmers shoot them or take away their breeding grounds, the ticking of God’s clock will stop. Not only for them, ladies and gentlemen, but also for all of nature. Rotting carcasses breed blowflies and disease, which spreads to mammals, reptiles and other birds. Often to human beings as well. Food chains get broken, the delicate balance is disturbed, and the whole system comes crashing down. That’s why we care for vultures at Mogale, that’s why we love them. That’s why we sit with poisoned birds through many nights to nurse them back to health, that’s why we detoxify them, mend their wings, feed them with great patience and release them back into the wild. You can’t breed them in captivity, but you can heal them, save the injured and the sick. You can go out and educate farmers and sangomas, talk to them, plead with them, explain to them that nature is a finite resource, a delicate, fragile instrument. But it takes facilities and manpower, training, food, dedication and focus. And all of these things cost money. We get no financial aid from the government. Mogale is a private initiative, kept alive by volunteers working long hours, seven days a week – and contributions from people like you. People who care, people who would like their children to see a Cape vulture spread its awesome wings and ride the African thermals ten, twenty, fifty years from now.’

Donnie Branca stopped for a short, meaningful moment. I was ready to give him money. ‘We also have breeding programmes for servals, wild dogs, leopards and cheetahs,’ said Branca. Beside me, Emma shook her head and said softly, ‘No.’

I looked at her in surprise. ‘Poor branding,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll explain later.’

Then Donnie Branca invited us to view the animals with him.