Peter Dickson
The blue crane, South Africa’s already critically endangered national bird, has become the latest victim of poverty in the Eastern Cape.
Through a combination of wars, drought and famine, Southern Africa’s blue crane population has rapidly dwindled from 100 000 to 20 000 in Southern Africa over the past 15 years, placing it near the top of the endangered species list.
Now, in its last breeding ground in the Eastern Cape’s drought-prone Karoo and the north-east Cape regions, the blue crane is slowly being poisoned for food.
State protection has not helped. In only one week last month, farmers and conservation officers found the remains of 20 cranes in Cradock’s Commando Drift Nature Reserve that had died after eating poisoned grain.
Conservationists, labelling it a “despicable activity” that endangered the health of those eating the birds, are so alarmed that they have called in the police.
It’s not only the blue crane, which once perched elegantly atop the impoverished Ciskei bantustan’s coat of arms, that has made it on to the menu of the Eastern Cape’s desperate population. The province’s distinctive helmeted guinea fowl die in their hundreds every week from poisoned grain.
It is so rife, particularly in the north- east Cape around Queenstown, that the Endangered Wildlife Trust last week launched Operation Guinea Fowl in the province and urged farmers and conservation officers to report poisoning cases to their offices and to the police; and to lock up pesticides to prevent theft. The trust is also advocating a blanket ban on free access to pesticides.
The trust’s poisoning working group representative and Queenstown area nature conservation officer, Tim de Jongh, said: “Our organisation has issued a stern warning to those who misuse pesticides to poison wildlife. Everything available in the law will be used to prosecute people responsible.”
Trust deputy director Professor Gerhard Verdoorn, who chairs the working group, said the very survival of the blue crane in its natural Eastern Cape habitat was at serious risk.
The blue crane, declared an endangered species in 1984, is now classified as critically endangered. Verdoorn said this category encompasses species facing total extinction within 10 to 15 years without serious help and planning by conservationists.