NCF Commemorates Vulture Day, Talks Conservation

The Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), recently commemorated the International Vulture Awareness Day (IVAD) across the nation through webinars hosted on five different days.

International and local NGOs embarked on vulture conservation awareness campaign in Africa, as the need to promote conservation message becomes more important in the face of the world battling the effect of COVID-19, and in order to prevent another pandemic through zoonotic disease, according to a statement by NCF.

Director of Technical programmes, NCF, Dr. Joseph Onoja, in his presentation revealed that “nature has bestowed on us vultures as environmental sanitary officers with a clean-up service worth $11,000 in a year.

“Without vultures, humans are vulnerable to the spread of infectious diseases, because, in the absence of vultures, dogs and rats become the clean-up crew. The danger in this is that these animals are not equipped for such and are close to human population, exposing us to diseases.”

In his presentation, Mr. Aniekan-Abasi Emmah Uwatt, a conservation biologist and ornithologist, observed that human activities are the major drivers to the vultures’ threatened status. He added that the world could suffer from negligence if something drastic is not done to preserve the remaining vulture species in Nigeria.

He said “Imagine a world without vultures, it will lead to disease outbreaks such as anthrax; rabies; botulism; we would also have dirty environment with dead carcasses and foul smells.”

Another facilitator, Mr. Apeverga Paul Tersoo, Lecturer, Federal University Dutse, Jigawa State said that Vultures may not be very appealing by their looks, but these birds, also known as scavengers do the dirty jobs of cleaning our environment by taking care of carcasses and preventing the spread of diseases which in turn keeps the ecosystem healthy. The importance of these natural environmental cleaners cannot be over emphasized because the benefits we derive from them for free will cost us so much that it can only be imagined.