AFTER seeing a vulture on a farm in the Hofmeyr district, Mid-Karoo Express tracked down vulture activistKate Webster in Komani on their farm situated in the Tylden area.
Kate has been rehabilitating vultures there for many years. She works as the Eastern Cape representative of Vulpro, which is a registered NGO that is involved with vultures, in particular the Cape vulture.
Vulpro is based in the North West Province near the Hartebeespoort Dam area and the Magaliesberg where there are larger colonies of the Cape vulture.
They operate a captive breeding programme for Cape vultures and are in the process of expanding it to include the African white-backed vulture.
Kate’s activities include doing power line reports for electrocuted birds or those which have collided with the lines.
They feed this information back to Eskom and follow up on the progress on mitigation measures that must take place.
She also physically walks under power lines which are brought to her attention as potential problems.
She collects all injured and sick vultures within the province and either rehabilitates them or, if they are non-releasable, she will stabilise them to be able to get them transported to Vulpro in North West.
This translocation is done in collaboration with DHL Supply chain, who kindly transport the vultures on their long haul trucks free of charge.
If a bird is releasable then, if possible, it will be fitted with a tracking device, which is very costly, to monitor the bird.
This year they had fitted two birds with devices – both power line collision birds which were releasable.
The first bird was called Thomas and is still on the wing and flies up and down the eastern side of the Eastern Cape from north of Mthatha to the Winterberg mountain range. Very valuable data is being collected from this bird.
The second bird came from Dordrecht.
A farmer, Grant Wiehahn, found her. This vulture was released in the Barkly Pass area and she remained in the province for just over a month before crossing the Free State into the North West province near Vryburg/Schweizer-Reineke area.
Unfortunately she succumbed to cyanide poisoning, approximately four months after release.
Other than the releasable ones, Kate has collected live vultures from Bedford (Patryshoogte), Aliwal North, Knapdaar (near the Orange River) and the Stormberg range, which were all transported to Vulpro.
In most cases their wings have either been completely fractured or they have permanent ligament damage.
Recently she was alerted to an injured bird in the Upper Cathcart area but due to failing light conditions could not catch it and came up empty handed the next day.
Sadly she found an electrocuted bird (not the same one) under a power line which has been reported to Eskom.