Zambia’s Big Cat Populations Growing Thanks to Poacher Alert Systems
Lion and leopard populations in Zambia’s Kafue National Park are increasing after decades of decline largely caused by poaching. One strategy that has had a positive impact is the use of tracked vultures as an alert system.
Conservation organisation Panthera has announced that big cat densities in Kafue, the third-largest national park in Africa, were either stable or growing from 2018 to 2022, the last year with comprehensive data.
Kim Young-Overton, director of Panthera’s program in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, told Reuters that experts were “starting to see strong indications that those populations are trending upwards now in areas where we have been investing in protection support”.
One piece of evidence was that Kafue prides showed an increase in lion cub births from 2018 to 2021. Andrew Loverage, the director of Panthera’s lion program, said that adult survival rates were up, meaning that female lions would be “more likely to give birth to cubs”.
Poachers historically have targeted Kafue’s leopards for their pelts, used in ceremonial attire, and herbivores in the park on which lions prey, leading to food shortages for Kafue lions. Farmers have also been known to kill lions suspected of taking their livestock through a variety of methods, such as snares, arrows and guns.
40 anti-poaching patrol teams are deployed in the park currently, thanks to increasing collaboration between conservation groups, Africa Parks, and Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife. This cooperation has also produced some surprising and innovative techniques to prevent poaching.
One technique involves tagging white-backed and hooded vultures, allowing teams in the park to track their wheareabouts and notify them of the location of caracsses. Farmers in some cases have resorted to poisoning the carcasses of cows as revenge for big cats that have caught them. These carcasses also attract vultures; the white-backed vulture has been ravaged by poisoning, declining to 10% of its population 40 years ago in West Africa.
Corinne Kendall, curator of conservation and research at North Carolina Zoo, which is leading the Kafue vulture initiative, says that the large groups of vultures, especially white-backed, that will feed on one carcass has exacerbated the situation, with up to 100 vultures feeding on, and dying because of, a poisoned cattle corpse.
Since 2021, rangers and zoo experts have tagged 19 vultures with satellite tags. Poisonings are relatively rare in Kafue, but Kendall says that tagged vultures have revealed two suspected poisonings which allowed rangers to dispose of the carcass, track down the perpetrators, and thereby save vultures and big cats.
Kendall has said the bizarre method should not be underestimated, pointing out that “poisoning is a silent killers”; it is likely that the vast majority of animals that die from poisonings do not have their cause of death discovered. She added that “unless you have something like satellite-tagged vultures, a lot might be going on without anyone knowing about it”.