by Andrea Santangeli
Last year in October I joined Vultures Namibia during their yearly survey of vultures in commercial farms and in the Namib-Naukluft Park. I was given a Vultures Namibia hat by Holger with the promise to come back and study poison use by farmers in Namibia, and its implications for conserving vultures.
As promised, I will be back (26th September) with a field assistant (Volen from Bulgaria) and Vultures Namibia hat, to study the use of poison by farmers across the country. The project will ultimately deliver crucial information regarding the extent and approximate hotspots of poison use in Namibia, which is a first step to initiate management actions to protect our beloved and endangered vultures from their number one threat.
In practice, we will travel across the country, trying to get as many farmers as possible to answer our short and simple questionnaire. We will try to visit the meetings of local farmers associations to hopefully interact with many farmers at once.
Organising logistics for such a project is challenging, especially when coming from abroad. Therefore, I call upon you to send information (place and date of the meetings of local farmers associations) to andrea.santangeli@helsinki.fi if you happen to have any such info, or to put us in contact with farmers who might have such info.
Also, I invite you to spread a link (see below) among as many farmers as possible to a preliminary online survey regarding the availability of farmers to respond to our questionnaire:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zrNI5TO2pGnU8nuInRJKMp6FHf3dfttfnsQLnShCYM0/viewform
It is our wish that many farmers will be willing to participate, for the sake of their own farming activity and the persistence of the vultures in the skies of Namibia.
(I want to appeal to all readers of this newsletter to please help and support Andrea and Volen as much as possible because this study will provide vital information for our struggle to save Africa’s vultures—Ed.)