Hello All,

 

Neil wrote on ‘tanzaniabirds’ today:

 

“one theory had the Masai washing out their tick dawa containers in the local dove watering hole.”

Well, it was in West Kilimanjaro and back in early September (oh one wonders how many species have become extinct since then?), we were visiting “Hemingway’s” - the delightful new camp of Hoopoe Safaris. It is situated within the administrative area of Olmolog village.

 

At midday on September 8^th I was birding with Hajji, who is Hoopoe’s on-site nature guide, we were on a walk some two kilometres south west of camp. We visited a water hole – the only surface fresh water for a long ways around - an open and partially excavated pit with near vertical to 45 degree earthen banks. The hole is carefully maintained and protected from wild ungulates by the local Maasai cattle-men in order to provide water for their animals, for collecting some of their own drinking water and for diluting the chemicals with which they ‘drench’ their cattle. The drench solution is, I believe applied in the normal manner, a pour-on along the length of the animal’s middle backbone. It is applied there at the site, right beside the pool, and is very effective against various ectoparasites, as I understood it is used chiefly against ticks (and not against tick-peckers per se). However in the wider environment it is also appears to be highly toxic to some birds, and particularly it would seem to doves.

 

The problem seems to stem from the fact that the animals are treated from one or two leaky plastic buckets and that these buckets, containing significant residues of the drug one might assume, are being repeatedly rinsed-out in the water hole, and presumably these buckets are refilled in the pool each time the mixture has been used-up, and certainly after all the animals present on that day have received their health-enhancing drench.

 

As to how often any one group of herders feels obliged to repeat this procedure on their animals in the course of a year, perhaps one dreads to think.

We were told that cow herders, from the different neighbouring communities, certainly bring their animals for treatment here on different days of the week.

 

Hajji and I examined the discarded yellow and red packaging of the drug that was discarded in a bush nearby but, as this interest was evidently being quite carefully evaluated by our Maasai hosts, I declined to make a note of the brand name let alone retain it. I keep meaning to go the vets here in Arusha to see if I can find the same make!

 

On September 8^th there were corpses of doves literally all over the place. Stupefied doves of four species were watched waddling around in the dust or floundering along the clay rim of the water hole, two were floating in the water and about seven were lying in a pile in the corner.

The surface of the pool was strewn with a scum of feathers and down, some of which a young boy was nonchalantly scooping away. Moribund doves were perched in groups of from five to thirty-odd in at least five acacia trees nearby. Several dove carcasses were lying about on the ground near the pool, some were found many tens of metres from the pool and appeared as if they had been carried there and the flesh partially or completely removed (often only wings and tail remained yet these were more or less intact. Perhaps they had been eaten by small wild carnivores, or by people even? Most poignant perhaps were the dead doves a hanging, suspended on the acacia thorns – as if on the ghoulish gibbet of hell’s keeper.

 

African Silverbills, Crimson-rumped Waxbills and Parrot-billed Sparrows were also coming down to the water hole and some were noted as “appearing to have been adversely affected by drinking the water”. However no dead bird from these three species was found.

 

Obviously we felt obliged to dispense with gentile political correctness and fraternally inform the Maasai of our opinions on the spot; warning them that they were probably dealing death to more than crawling dudu. Maasai workers at the camp were informed later that afternoon and all understood quite well what was being suggested. They all utterly refuted the suggestion that they might be poisoning the pool. Counter claims were made immediately. That the doves were dying either through over-indulgence, greedily drinking too much of the water, or that it was a special avian disease - some form of bird flu no doubt - that the Maasai believed was more or less specific to the doves.

 

Since doves were converging to drink at this pool from many kilometres around one wonders what impact this might be having on the population, locally. One also wonders how often more or less the same field trial is being replicated right across the African savannas; and all supposedly in the cause of improved animal welfare.

 

One should certainly assume that the ever-expanding use of pharmaceuticals on livestock; especially, but no means entirely, by partially-literate pastoralists; can only be bad news for many constituents of the increasingly hard-pressed non-human communities still out there, full of surprises, in the fabled green hills of Africa.

 

And any wildlife enthusiast, especially those recently in the rich world, should certainly appreciate the toll on nature that has been wrought by the seemingly inexorable increase in the use of ‘beneficial drugs’ which have been inveigled onto farmers over the past fifty years.

 

 

 

we have quite recently rec'd two notices of doves dying in large numbers.

one form the Gelai side of Natron, the other from West Kili.

now, on the Kenyabirdnet today there are also two reports of doves dying in large numbers.

one of these from just north of Lake Magadi.

This is just to let everyone know that TGT collected samples and these have been forwarded to South Africa via the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Dar. No results yet but I'll let you all know when we hear anything.

grateful for any other similar observations.


Neil




Neil and Liz Baker, Tanzania Bird Atlas, P.O. Box 1605, Iringa, Tanzania.
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