Southern Ground-hornbill Bucorvus cafer is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa from Kenya, south to South Africa in dry forest, savannah and grassland habitats. It is currently considered Least Concern because despite its declining population, the overall population size or rate of decline are not believed the approach the thresholds for listing as Threatened under the IUCN Red List criteria. However, a recent assessment of the species’s status in South Africa (Kemp and Webster 2008) estimates a 20% loss in the area of suitable habitat within the species’s national range in the past 15 years. This equates to a population decline of 74% over a three generation period (93.9 years based on a generation length of 31.3 years, BirdLife International unpublished data) assuming an exponential rate of decline and ongoing habitat loss. Declines may exceed this rate because the species is threatened not only by habitat loss driven by agricultural expansion, timber harvesting and infrastructure development, but also by direct use in medicine and trade, incidental mortality from snares, roadkills and poison bait and its intrinsic slow rate of reproduction as a result of its co-operative breeding system. Because this is such a long-lived species, it is difficult to extrapolate trends for three generations based on data from a shorter time-period. Declines are unlikely to have been rapid over the whole of the past three generations and probably only began in the latter part of the 20th Century, but they are likely to continue in the near future as the threats to the species increase through human population expansion. Is there evidence elsewhere in the species’s range to suggest that the species is declining, and is it plausible to infer declines of over 30% over three generations (beginning in the past and extrapolated into the future) which would qualify the species as Vulnerable under criterion A4, or declines of over 50% which could qualify it as Endangered? Comments on population trends and threats throughout the species’s range are welcomed.

Kemp, A. and Webster, R. (2008) Latest analysis of Southern Ground Hornbill (SGH) distribution and population in South Africa: December 2008. Unpublished report.