It's complicated

PROS AND CONS OF FEEDING VULTURES

- CHRISTIAAN WILLEM BRINK, RAPTOR AND LARGE TERRESTRIAL BIRD PROJECT MANAGER

Supplementary feeding has long been used by conservationists to support struggling wildlife populations and perhaps nowhere more so than in vulture conservation. Although humans may have been feeding vultures directly or indirectly for centuries (as in the case of Tibetan sky burials, for example), actively doing so for conservation purposes is said to have originated at Giant’s Castle Game Reserve in the Drakensberg in 1966.

Vulture supplementary feeding sites, also known as ‘vulture restaurants’, are specific locations where carcasses and offal are leftfor the scavengers to feed on. The aim of the Giant’s Castle vulture feeding site was to support the local Bearded Vulture population in particular, but subsequently similar sites have become a popular intervention to assist declining vulture populations around the world. In the early 1980s the Vulture Study Group undertook a major project to promote the use of vulture restaurants in South Africa and by 1988 there were 40 documented feeding sites as well as others that were not formally recognised.