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Earlier this year, the vulture conservation organization Vulpro hailed the return of Cape vultures to a farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, near Mountain Zebra National Park. That marked the first time this species has been seen in the area for 30 years, according to the organization.
“There’s more and more movement and foraging of the birds, and they are now finding these historical areas that they used to occur in and that it’s now safe again, which I think is incredibly exciting,” says Kerri Wolter, CEO of Vulpro.
The Cape vulture (Gyps coprotheres) is Southern Africa’s largest and only endemic vulture species. Beginning in the 1970s, Cape vulture colonies across the region shrank and many disappeared. It’s estimated that between 1992 and 2007, the species’ population in South Africa dropped by as much as 70%.
But in 2021, the Cape vulture’s conservation status improved from endangered to vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. An assessment that finds a vulture species is at decreased risk of extinction is “borderline unheard of,” says John Davies, senior field officer in the birds of prey program at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, a South African conservation NGO.
Seven of the nine vulture species found across Southern Africa, included the Cape vulture, fall into one of the threatened categories in the IUCN; three of them — the white-backed (Gyps africanus), white-headed (Trigonoceps occipitalis) and hooded (Necrosyrtes monachus) vultures — are considered critically endangered by the IUCN. Against this general decline, the story of the Cape vulture stands out as a glimmer of hope for many conservationists and experts.
Today, the bulk of the Cape vulture’s estimated global population of between 9,600 and 12,800 mature individuals resides in South Africa. Breeding colonies are also found in Botswana and a “tiny” population straddles the border of Mozambique and eSwatini, according to a review published last year.
“With a stable to increasing population at present, the Cape vulture does indeed provide hope for our conservation efforts focused on other species,” says André Botha, co-chair of the Vulture Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.
But conservationists such as Davies also warn against complacency: even if the species appears to be recovering, many threats remain. In May 2025, one of South Africa’s worst mass vulture poisoning events occurred in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. A single elephant carcass laced with poison killed 116 vultures, including Cape vultures. In 2022, a single poisoning event killed more than 100 white-backed vultures in the same park. These events are a reminder that things can change very quickly for scavengers that continue to face a multitude of threats.
Decline and recovery
Experts underline that the Cape vulture’s apparent success story didn’t occur overnight. In fact, the foundations of the species’ recovery stretches back more than five decades, says Botha, who is also the Africa projects manager at the Hawk Conservancy Trust, a U.K.-based NGO.
Davies agrees, pointing to several years of working with landowners to change practices and perceptions. In the past, Cape vultures were seen as a pest species and killed en masse. Defusing that conflict, alongside reducing unintentional poisoning and slowing land-use change, has played a part in the species’ recovery.
Other conservation actions — such as setting up rehabilitation centers and conducting captive breeding — have helped bolster populations, while a long-standing partnership between the Endangered Wildlife Trust and Eskom, South Africa’s electricity utility, has helped reduce the threat of collisions with power lines, Botha says.
Vulture Safe Zones, a model first developed to respond to a similar poisoning crisis among Asian vultures, have also been set up. These zones involve agreements with landowners and local authorities to reduce threats over expansive areas by protecting habitat and ensuring safe access to food sources The Karoo Vulture Safe Zone spans 23,000 square kilometers (8,880 square miles), for example.
But whether their implementation has played a part in the Cape vulture’s recovery remains uncertain.
A study published in 2023 suggested the species’ conservation status could have been improved even further, to near threatened, taking it out of the threatened categories. The study based this on calculations of the species’ rate of decline in the past two decades. But dropping down two rungs on the ladder to extinction would have been a controversial move for some: Davies says some conservationists pushed back at the single-rung drop from endangered to vulnerable.
Vulpro’s Wolter, for example, says the overall success of the Cape vulture’s conservation depends on whether you look at it from a population level or a colony one.
“Some colonies look like they’re doing really well, and other colonies aren’t doing very well, and some have seen localized extinctions,” she says, highlighting the absence of breeding colonies in Namibia and Zimbabwe, as well as in some parts of South Africa. “Until those extinct colonies have resurfaced, can we say that the species is doing well or that we have reversed things?”
She adds she’s skeptical of whether the recovery is as successful as it seems, and says she opposes any further easing of the species’ conservations status. “I definitely would not be complacent about how the species is doing, because if we are complacent, we then open the door to disasters, and then basically 50-plus years of dedicated Cape vulture conservation work goes down the toilet.”
Ongoing threats
Though in some instances Cape vultures are returning to their historical roosts, conservationists underline that this could all change rapidly.
May’s poisoning incident is firm evidence of that, Davies says. “Cape vultures aren’t as heavily poisoned as white-backs, but even so, I think in this case, there were about 20 dead,” he says.
He points to the Blouberg colony, home to the largest population of Cape vultures anywhere in its range, and how a similar poisoning incident there could be devastating. “Imagine if something like this happened below the slopes of that breeding colony, you know, and you lose a couple of hundred birds potentially,” he says. “That’s massive.”
Demand for vulture parts for “belief-based use,” which continues to drive vulture declines elsewhere, particularly in West Africa, is a growing concern in Southern Africa, Wolter says. In her view, this is the largest threat to the Blouberg colony.
Another significant problem is energy infrastructure such as power lines. The Cape vulture’s size — and its habit of swooping swiftly down from great heights when it spies a meal to scavenge — places it at great risk of often fatal collisions. Wolter says her organization’s rehabilitation centers receive around 120 vultures each year. Around 80% of those are victims of power lines, with the majority Cape vultures.
“We estimate that we probably only pick up about 10% of what the true reflection is,” she adds.
When collisions are reported, Davies says, experts head out to the site to carry out an inspection. Incidents are often followed by mitigation measures to make the lines more visible to birds.
The growth of wind farms is another threat, with development plans overlapping core areas of Cape vulture habitat. The vultures nest on cliff edges and high plateaus, which coincide with prime sites for wind turbines.
Learning from Cape vultures
Davies stresses that the still-fragile success with Cape vulture conservation rests on extensive community work, education, and engagements with landowners, farmers, and communities.
Wolter emphasizes the need to combine multiple approaches. “You need to look at rehabilitation. You need to look at captive breeding. You need to look at monitoring, but not just going and counting the birds,” she says. That means understanding each colony or nesting site and the threats it faces. “If it’s unsuccessful, what are those threats? And how do you mitigate those threats?”
Many of these lessons have already been rolled into vulture multispecies action plans, says Botha. “Key to the successful implementation of these actions is sustained effort, sourcing of essential resources in terms of funding and human capacity,” he adds. “Cross-border cooperation and government and political support for these actions are essential.”
But South Africa benefits from facilities, resources and research that aren’t often available in other parts of the continent.
In West Africa, for example, vulture species are declining rapidly driven by poaching for belief-based use. Joseph Daniels, a researcher at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, says the Cape vulture is a positive example but also highlights the gulf in conservation action required to replicate such results.
“In West Africa, we don’t have any vulture restaurants, we don’t have rehabilitation centers, we don’t have postmortem analysis,” Daniels says. “Cape vultures have benefited from all of this, and they will continue to benefit.”
Reflecting the relative strengths of conservation in Southern Africa, the Cape vulture is one of the best-studied vulture species in Africa. In Daniels’ view, more research focused on other vulture species and other regions is needed.
But beyond research, he says, more conservation action is needed: “What we really lack is moving forward with conservation. So even our protected areas are not really managed. Imagine if we had a rehabilitation center in Ghana or in Nigeria that is catering to all vulture species that we harbor in our region. That would be something beneficial.”
One of the major takeaways from the Cape vulture’s ongoing recovery is that there’s no silver bullet solution to vulture conservation. It takes a holistic approach and a keen understanding of the threats they face across the landscapes they scavenge in, says Danielle du Toit, a field officer at EWT.
“Just because the species has been downlisted, we shouldn’t take our eye off the ball, and we should still think of them as hugely vulnerable to threats,” she says. “I think people just paying attention to what the threats are, and paying attention to what they can do to minimize those threats will lead to conservation success stories across other species.”
Banner image: A Cape vulture in Kruger National Park, South Africa. Image by Jan Rose via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
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