Helping Endangered Cape vultures at Tswapong Hills, Eastern Botswana

 Cape vultures are vulnerable and endemic to southern Africa, and their breeding in eastern Botswana are surrounded by agricultural lands. We discovered that at least 15% of the chicks were born with deformed bones, a sign of calcium deficiency, which make them fail to fly. After thorough consultation with stakeholders, we initiated a project to provide over 500kg of bone fragments as calcium supplement to the vultures during the breeding season (May-November 2019). This project is part of the IUCN Save Our Species (https://iucnsos.org/initiative/sos-african-wildlife/), co-funded by the European Union.  Bones are rich in calcium and therefore help in the skeletal development and growth. Mothers eat bones and feed chicks in the nests. The number of chicks with bone deformities decreasing by 58% in the first year of intervention, less than 5% of chicks reported with bone deformities thereafter.  We have seen a successful uptake of the project by the local community and this project is still running with little input from us.