Two women researchers are hunting down the elusive southern ground hornbill in Morgan Bay.The hornbills’ 20cm-long beaks can crush mamba skulls, yet despite their hunting prowess, they are headed for extinction, Mabula Ground Hornbill project manager and PhD student Lucy Kemp, 38, said.
An estimated 1500 of the unusual, 1m-high scavengers, with their long lashes and bright red pouches, are alive.
Only 400 breeding pairs are believed to exist. Southern ground hornbills live for about 60 years and adults weigh about 5kg.
Kemp and her assistant, Natasha Nel, 31, are in the Eastern Cape for a month trying for the first time to sight the birds and register them on the SA bird atlas.
They asked the public to SMS or Whats-app any sightings to 0832898610 or e-mail project@ground-hornbill.org.za.
Kemp blamed careless use of agricultural poisons on carcasses, and hunters who toss out offal containing tiny fragments of bullet lead.
The lead enters the bird’s system and drives them insane, Kemp said.
A third to half of the surviving birds live in Kruger Park.
“Please send us the date, an accurate place of sighting and numbers of birds,” Kemp asked.
No birds were found in Alexandria last week, but in the Morgan Bay and Kei area there have been reports of seven, the researchers said from their tented campsite at Yellowwood Forest, Morgan Bay.
Kemp, the daughter of ornithologist Alan Kemp, 72, started the non-profit NGO four years ago. It has offices at the Bella-Bella Private Game Reserve, Limpopo.
She read her masters in marine biology from the University of Cape Town “but preferred the bush” and did her doctorate on the hornbills.
Nel, who has a degree in nature conservation, said it was tough, dirty work tracking down the birds, but “we go to cool places”.
“So far, the SA bird atlas project shows massive reduction of the birds,” Kemp said. Her hope is that this is because “nobody has been out to look for them”.
On Thursday, despite feeling grungy after a hard day in the Komgha bush, they said farmers had sighted five groups of three to seven birds between the coast and the N2.
To attract the hornbills, they put up a “monster” speaker to broadcast the hornbill’s throaty call and then set up a fibre-glass trap and put their life-sized decoy fibreglass bird inside.
“When the hornbill goes in to sort out the ‘invader’, we pull the string and a shutter falls.”
The women grab the hornbill’s lethal beak and once they put their hand on its back, “they go down”.
“We cover their eyes, and take a blood sample. We don’t mark them.”
They will be looking for the hornbills in the Merensky plantations near Mthatha and around Coffee Bay.
When they are not out hunting for the birds, they sit at their laptops “pecking away”, Kemp added. — mikel@dispatch.co.za
Duo in search of rare hornbill
The hornbills’ 20cm-long beaks can crush mamba skulls, yet despite their hunting prowess, they are headed for extinction, Mabula Ground Hornbill project manager and PhD student Lucy Kemp, 38, said.
An estimated 1500 of the unusual, 1m-high scavengers, with their long lashes and bright red pouches, are alive.
Only 400 breeding pairs are believed to exist. Southern ground hornbills live for about 60 years and adults weigh about 5kg.
Kemp and her assistant, Natasha Nel, 31, are in the Eastern Cape for a month trying for the first time to sight the birds and register them on the SA bird atlas.
They asked the public to SMS or Whats-app any sightings to 0832898610 or e-mail project@ground-hornbill.org.za.
Kemp blamed careless use of agricultural poisons on carcasses, and hunters who toss out offal containing tiny fragments of bullet lead.
The lead enters the bird’s system and drives them insane, Kemp said.
A third to half of the surviving birds live in Kruger Park.
“Please send us the date, an accurate place of sighting and numbers of birds,” Kemp asked.
No birds were found in Alexandria last week, but in the Morgan Bay and Kei area there have been reports of seven, the researchers said from their tented campsite at Yellowwood Forest, Morgan Bay.
Kemp, the daughter of ornithologist Alan Kemp, 72, started the non-profit NGO four years ago. It has offices at the Bella-Bella Private Game Reserve, Limpopo.
She read her masters in marine biology from the University of Cape Town “but preferred the bush” and did her doctorate on the hornbills.
Nel, who has a degree in nature conservation, said it was tough, dirty work tracking down the birds, but “we go to cool places”.
“So far, the SA bird atlas project shows massive reduction of the birds,” Kemp said. Her hope is that this is because “nobody has been out to look for them”.
On Thursday, despite feeling grungy after a hard day in the Komgha bush, they said farmers had sighted five groups of three to seven birds between the coast and the N2.
To attract the hornbills, they put up a “monster” speaker to broadcast the hornbill’s throaty call and then set up a fibre-glass trap and put their life-sized decoy fibreglass bird inside.
“When the hornbill goes in to sort out the ‘invader’, we pull the string and a shutter falls.”
The women grab the hornbill’s lethal beak and once they put their hand on its back, “they go down”.
“We cover their eyes, and take a blood sample. We don’t mark them.”
They will be looking for the hornbills in the Merensky plantations near Mthatha and around Coffee Bay.
When they are not out hunting for the birds, they sit at their laptops “pecking away”, Kemp added. — mikel@dispatch.co.za
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