In stronghold of Guinea-Bissau, endangered vultures soar again

Their heads are boiled into soup, their claws crushed into powder, and their feathers plucked to provide protection from curses. Traditional healers in the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau consider the critically endangered hooded vulture a prize ingredient capable of treating ailments ranging from stomachaches to epilepsy. 

“No other bird can fly so high. Vultures are powerful animals,” says Idrissa Biai, one of Guinea-Bissau’s most prominent traditional healers, who runs the national chapter of Prometra, a nongovernmental organization that promotes traditional medicine. 

“They have loads of uses. It really depends on the individual healer,” he says, reflecting the sentiment that has helped drive an illicit trade.

Guinea-Bissau was long home to the world’s largest populations of hooded vultures, or Necrosyrtes monachus. Hard data is scarce as researchers lack the resources to carry out nationwide population surveys, but in 2018, it was estimated the country was home to some 43,000 hooded vultures. That’s almost a quarter of the last global estimate of 197,000 birds, although that survey was itself carried out more than a decade ago, in 2011. What’s certain is that any dip – or rise – in numbers in Guinea-Bissau has an outsize impact on the overall population.

And, beginning in 2019, a series of mass poisonings by poachers there left thousands of birds “bubbling from their beaks” as they died. Spurred largely by demand from traditional healers from as far afield as neighboring Senegal and Nigeria, a third of the population in Guinea-Bissau was wiped out. Across Africa, vultures also fall victim to so-called secondary poisoning when they eat poisoned meat left out by farmers trying to fend off predators like lions or wild dogs. Today, 6 out of 11 vulture species living on the continent are endangered. 

The plunging numbers aren’t just a loss for biodiversity. The carrion-eating birds are vital to the ecosystem.

“Vultures are important because they clean up the environment,” says Hamilton Montero, a senior scientist at the state-backed National Institute of Biodiversity and Protected Areas. “People in the countryside drink from rivers, and if animals die there and are not consumed by vultures, these rivers get easily contaminated.”

Now, a remarkable conservation effort is slowly reining in illicit trade, with the population “beginning to stabilize,” says Mr. Montero. The rising populations are a sign that long-held beliefs that contributed to decimating vultures could be slowly reversing, too.

“People now realize that instead of using vultures ... we should be saving them,” says Francisco Gomes Wambar, director of the Organização para Defesa e Desenvolvimento das Zonas Húmidas (Organization for the Defense and Development of Wetlands), an NGO that spearheaded the campaign to end poaching. 

Changing attitudes

Relatives to hawks and eagles, the scruffy hooded vulture, whose ruff of feathers look like pulled-back hoods, has long been associated with death. When they circle in the sky, herders in rural Guinea-Bissau know that hyenas or other predators could be moving in for the kill. 

But for all the negative press they receive, researchers believe that healthy vulture populations can also stop the spread of anthrax, rabies, and a host of other zoonotic diseases. 

Initial reports of mass poisonings in Guinea-Bissau emerged in 2019. The following year proved even deadlier. More than 2,000 vultures were found dead in 2020, marking “the world’s largest vulture poisoning incident to date,” Birdlife International said. 

Conservationists knew they had to take drastic action – and fast. 

And so, in 2021, Organização para Defesa e Desenvolvimento das Zonas Húmidas (ODZH), a local partner of Birdlife International, launched a series of public information campaigns. More than 50 radio programs were broadcast across the country, from the capital to remote villages. And dozens of meetings were held with traditional healers – the go-to for most people feeling unwell in Guinea-Bissau, according to health officials – as well as students and teachers. 

The results have been so promising that a second campaign is planned to launch in July, funded by the British government. 

“The problem we faced is that communities didn’t want to hand over information about killings. Snitches were looked down on, but that is beginning to change,” explains Mr. Wambar, the ODZH director. Since the campaign, if people “have information about a killing, they will denounce it to the authorities.”

In one incident, villagers near the small northwestern town of Canchungo caught a poacher decapitating vultures in a field. The man claimed he was a traveling flip-flop salesman, but villagers detained him until the police arrived. The suspect later told the police he had been sent by a healer from Senegal to hunt vultures, and was imprisoned for damaging public goods, the standard charge for wildlife crime in Guinea-Bissau. Two presumed accomplices managed to escape.  

Meanwhile, Bissau-Guinean law enforcement is also running parallel operations of their own, deploying a network of secret informants in local markets and making a number of arrests. One informant caught with three vulture heads in 2021 was told he could either go to prison or collaborate. He began taking part in sting operations at an open-air slaughterhouse at the edge of the capital, where hundreds of birds perch every day waiting for offcuts. Posing as a buyer, he secretly filmed traders selling vulture heads. 

Despite switching sides, the informant remains convinced by the mystical power of vultures. “It works,” he says adamantly. “I sometimes have 10 people a day asking me for heads.”

But population recovery will inevitably be slow. Hooded vultures typically lay one egg every two years, not all of which will hatch. And, in one of the world’s poorest countries, poaching remains a longstanding issue. “We can only go so far without tackling poverty,” says Mr. Wambar. “If people had other ways to make a living, they wouldn't take the risk of getting caught poisoning vultures.” 

Illegal fishing and turtle poaching in the country’s famed Bijagos archipelago – a biodiversity hot spot – takes place in a similar dynamic. 

Still, conservationists have scored significant victories. Mass killings of hooded vultures haven’t been recorded since 2020. Traditional healers say that individual birds are still sometimes poached, but the trade has slowed significantly. 

In Bandim market, a sprawling, parasol-covered labyrinth of cloth, plastic, and food stalls, vulture heads could once be found openly for as little as $2.50. Now, they sell for 10 times that price – and only if they can be found at all.

“It is hard to get a regular supply,” says one trader in a hushed voice, sitting by his stall and scanning for customers. “If the police catch you, you will go straight to prison.” 

Most traditional healers have given up using them altogether. “Nobody is killing en masse anymore,” says Mr. Biai, the widely known traditional healer. “Today if you say to someone that you work with vultures, it is like telling them that you are a witch.”