Poaching link to bird deaths
January 08, 2004 Edition -1
John Yeld
Even several hundred metres out at sea, the nauseating stench of burnt feathers and charred flesh from the island is overwhelming.
This is Dyer Island near Danger Point off the southern Cape coast, where for the past 10 days, conservation officials have incinerated more than 4 800 Cape cormorants killed by highly infectious avian cholera.
And the officials are pointing fingers at perlemoen poachers, who have devastated stocks around the important conservation island, as probably being at least partly to blame for the huge number of bird deaths.
This is because of the stress they cause among breeding colonies of several seabird species when they go trampling over the island at night.
The Cape cormorants - nearly all fledglings, with about 15 adults - were infected with avian cholera which kills within six to 24 hours. The incineration of the carcasses is an attempt to stop the disease from spreading.
Dyer Island was one of two sanctuaries which suffered catastrophic outbreaks between about May and December 2002, when more than 7 000 Cape cormorants died.
"It (the cholera) really created mayhem," said Lauren Waller of Cape Nature Conservation (CNC), which administers the small island.
But yesterday she was happier, because the Cape cormorants' body count was "only" 120 by noon and she was hoping that this was signalling a marked tail-off in mortalities.
"It was averaging 700 a day and yesterday it was down to 300, so we're quite excited and we're hoping it will be below 200," she said.
Waller believes that continuous poaching around Dyer Island has contributed to the current outbreak of the disease.
But there has been a positive side to the disaster: excellent levels of co-operation between CNC, the Overstrand municipality, the Department of Environmental Affairs' "Coast-care" programme, and individuals from nearby communities.
Normally there is just one nature conservation field ranger on the island, although numbers have been boosted recently by security guards from a local company in an effort to control the poachers.
"But we had to get extra help, we were just so overwhelmed by the volume of dead birds," Waller explained.
Yesterday there were still five rescuers on the island, after two volunteers left after a six-day stint.
They were Waller; conservation officer Monique van Wyk and third-year conservation student Bongani Sithole, both from the Overstrand municipality; Coast-care volunteer Carola Zardo, volunteers Françcois de Flamingh and Charlene Brown, and security guard Luckios Thethe.
De Flamingh, a fashion designer by profession whose parents live at nearby Gansbaai and who is a friend of Waller, had been helping after Christmas until
yesterday.
"This is about the furthest I could get from fashion - I really didn't know what I was letting myself in for," he joked of the island.
It uses a generator for electricity, has a septic tank - which Overstrand municipal officials had to restore to working order - and no running water.
Brown, a teacher, lives in Hermanus.
Waller said the extra workers had been "great".
"They really bought into things very well - it's been awesome, quite a community effort."
Gansbaai conservationist Wilfred Chivell, who runs a boat-based whale-watching operation from the Kleinbaai slipway, has been ferrying the volunteers and supplies such as wood for the incinerator and extra black bags to collect the bird carcasses, to and from the island, at no charge.
"I've been doing this for them (Cape Nature Conservation) for many years, so it's nothing new for me," he said.
He described the avian cholera outbreak as "really terrible".
"If there's one good thing about it, it's that it is young birds that are dying - at least it's not the adults which will be able to come back and breed again."
Sithole, who also came off the island yesterday after helping for six days, said it had been difficult to get used to the stench of death from the incinerator and to the need to wring the occasional infected bird's neck to put it out of its misery more quickly.
"But I survived," he quipped.
She added nostalgically: "I must go back to that island - it's beautiful."
What is avian cholera
Avian cholera - which does not affect people - is caused by a bacterium which occurs in the upper respiratory tract of individual "carrier" birds and causes no outward signs of infection.
"Outbreaks occur when conditions favour an increase in the rate of reproduction and overall numbers of bacteria, which leads to mutations and to the development of new, more virulent strains of the bacterium," explain ornithologists Tony Williams and Vincent Ward in a scientific paper published in the journal Bird Numbers after the 2002 outbreak in several seabird colonies around the Cape coast.
They say avian cholera outbreaks are generally associated with birds under one - or generally several - forms of stress, which include reduced food availability and disturbance in the breeding areas.
"During the Dyer Island outbreak, abalone (perlemoen) poachers were active at night both on and around the island," they say. - Environment Writer
