Limbe Wildlife Centre

Category: Cameroon, Simone de Vries, rehabilitation | Date: Aug 30 2009 | By: limbewildlifecentre

Today we moved a palmnut vulture from the quarantine area into the flight cage of the Fraser’s eagle owl. The very young palmnut vulture was brought to us by a man who seized it from some other people who had pulled out the wing feathers. It is not quite clear what these people wanted to do with the bird, but fortunately the man interfered. We hope that his feathers will grow back, so we can release him back to the wild.

In the last months we have fed the vulture with meat and palmnuts. This species of vultures is the only one not feeding strictly on meat. As a matter of fact, our palmnut vulture really likes palmnuts a lot! In the area of Limbe a lot of rainforest has been cut in order to space for oil palm plantations. It is therefor not a surprise that palmnut vultures are common around here.

The rehabilitation of this particular vulture takes a long time. He arrived in the LWC in April, but after 4 months the wings show very little progress. As the feathers were pulled out at a very young age there is a possibility that the wings will not completely recover.

We have now moved him to a bigger space where he can move around more. We hope that this will help him to stay healthy and strong. He is now sharing an enclosure with our Fraser’s eagle owl. We did not know how they would respond to each other, but they seem to be fine together. In the beginning the owl made himself really big by putting up all his feathers, but then he realized that it was okay. The upper branches are for Fraser, the lower ones for the vulture.

On the picture below you can see that the wings still have a long way to go.

Best wishes,

Simone

Tags: palmnut vulture, rehabilitation

One response so far