Karoo Vulture Safe Zone

Karoo farmers and other landowners have partnered with The Rupert Nature Foundation, South African National Parks, MZCPE, Endangered Wildlife Trust and SANParks Honorary Rangers to create a 23,000 sq km vulture safe zone in the Great Karoo.

The Karoo Vulture Safe Zone is a project wherein the Endangered Wildlife Trust field officers work with landowners between the Mountain Zebra National Park in the East and the Karoo National Park in the west. The project aims to assist and facilitate landowners to manage their property in a Vulture-friendly manner. This then creates a safe environment for vultures, as well as other raptors, to scavenge and forage.

The project works to mitigate threats to vultures on a landscape, on-the-ground, level. These threats include: unsafe energy infrastructure which causes collisions or electrocutions; unintentional poisoning, intentional poisoning, lead poisoning through ingestion of lead-contaminated carcasses or discarded offcuts of carcasses; and drowning in farm reservoirs.

The Karoo Vulture Safe Zone works with landowners, on  the landscape, for  the survival of vultures within the Karoo.

The area we work in includes: Somerset East,  Middelburg,  Murraysburg,  Cradock,  Beaufort West,  Graaff-Reinet, Pearston