11 February, 2025
By David Goodman
David Goodman, Samuel Boakye Yiadom, Kaboumba Lin-Ernni Mikégraba, and Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra in Ghana. Photo by Samuel Boakye Yiadom.
I’ve always been amazed by the extent to which vultures and humans have different habitat preferences. I had plenty of time to consider these preferences while spending well over 150 hours in the car over a period of 17 days, undertaking a nationwide vulture survey in Ghana with IBCP. From a human perspective, vultures seem determined to spend much of their time in very unappealing places. Slaughterhouses, landfills, roadkill, murder scenes. They fly hundreds of miles in search of places that most of us avoid like the plague. Incidentally, they're the exact kinds of places where plagues tend to start...
Hooded Vultures (Necrosyrtes monachus) on the roof of a waste site in Ghana. Photo by Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra.
This is one of the reasons why this survey was particularly hard for our team. It was essentially a country-wide horror tour of everywhere people dump trash and kill animals. My friends at IBCP, Abiola, Yendoubouam, Kaboumba and I would sometimes pine after the work we were doing just a couple weeks before in Togo and Benin – backcountry camping in national parks, paddling pirogues into marshes, lackadaisical hikes into the savanna with binoculars and a packed lunch. The landfills were definitely a less beautiful locale.
Cattle and people scavenge in a landfill. Photo by David Goodman.
These landfills can be massive. One of the primary landfills outside of Accra, Ghana's capital, is a veritable mountain of plastic and trash. Much of it is on fire, though the flames rarely reach the surface. Instead, the fire smolders meters under the surface, burning sinkholes in the reeking massif of refuse and detritus. The noxious air is hazy with smoke that makes your snot run black for days. It smells like death and burnt plastic. Workers are shipped in by exploitive gangs and work for pennies a day collecting anything of use, mostly plastic bottles. Kathleen Millar, economic anthropologist, wrote a well-known book about the practice, describing those forced to live in the desperate, marginal "shadowlands" of modern industrial capitalism, largely hidden from the wealthy first world.
Vultures at a slaughterhouse in Ghana. Photo by Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra.
Most landfills of this size have paths solid enough for a car that snakes up to the summit. Here, above the trucks and bulldozers, thousands of birds wheel across the sky in huge gyres: great black crows with beady eyes and grating calls, cattle egrets startlingly white against the tombstone sky, and vultures — massive, lumbering, prehistoric things with pink, fleshy heads and cruelly hooked beaks. I happen to think that vultures are beautiful birds that get an unfair bad rap. This setting, however, makes it easy to understand why they have the reputation of harbingers of the apocalypse. They can look malicious and antediluvian in the hazy sky, their close evolutionary relationship with pterodactyls somehow more obvious than ever. They land on the smoking heap in search of dead things and filth. They throw back their heads and bituminous things slide down their gullets.
Hooded Vultures perch on a dumpster in Ghana. Photo by Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra.
When we weren’t at a landfill we were usually at a slaughterhouse. I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say that I used to think that historical sources were being poetic when they said “the streets ran red with blood.” I’m now pretty sure that phrase, and the volume of liquid it implies, was being used literally.
Hooded Vultures at a slaughterhouse in Ghana. Photo by Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra.
Besides the landfills and slaughterhouses, we saw many vultures at their roosting sites. Samuel Boakye Yiadom, the leader of our expedition in Ghana and incredibly knowledgeable about the vultures of the region, already knew the location of many roosting sites for the Hooded Vulture. And when we began surveying regions that he wasn't familiar with, he proved to have a preternatural sense of where they might be found. Seeing vultures roosting in the upper boughs of a beautiful tree is a good reminder of how amazing they truly are. Beyond just being a crucial part of the ecosystem, they're huge, charismatic birds that really look like nothing else. I'm thrilled that there are people like Abiola, Yendoubouam and Kaboumba working to protect them in West Africa.
Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra photographs Hooded Vultures at a slaughterhouse in Ghana. Photo by Yendoubouam Kourdjouak.
At many of the slaughterhouses we visited, one of our goals was to determine whether the people working there were poaching the vultures that come to slaughterhouses for food. Vultures are often illegally trapped and killed by enterprising butchers. A single vulture can sell for the equivalent of over a year’s wages for many working at the slaughterhouse, so the temptation to poach is high. Several times, it benefited the team for me to go slightly "undercover" to see if anyone would sell me a vulture.
IBCP research team in discussion with slaughterhouse staff. Photo by Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra.
Buying something illegal as a conspicuous foreigner is complicated. When I approached the wary butchers about buying a vulture, we’d enter a delicate negotiation; they tried to figure out if I was a conservationist spy, and I tried to determine if they were willing to poach on my behalf.
This dance was made stranger by my cover story: I told the butchers that I was a conservation biologist (true and legal) and I implied that I wanted to buy a vulture to study it (untrue and illegal). Butchers would only agree to poach if they believed I was lying about being a conservation biologist. They had to think I only wanted a vulture to use for voodoo, and that I was using a job as "conservation biologist" as a cover story. So, my strategy to convince the poachers that I wasn’t a conservation biologist was to say outright that I was… a conservation biologist.
Vultures at a slaughterhouse in Ghana. Video by Abiola Sylvestre Chaffra.
To make it worse, I couldn't be too convincing, otherwise the butchers would genuinely believe I was a conservation biologist and not sell me a vulture. But I also couldn't be too unconvincing, or my whole narrative would seem fake and they would suspect me of being... a conservation biologist, which is of course exactly what I was telling them. Confused? So was I. Don't worry, I've included this helpful flowchart to make things clearer.
Conservation biologist or black-market vulture trader? Flowchart by David Goodman.
The crazy double-bluff twisted the entire encounter into a bizarre knot of innuendo and inference where the worst thing I could be suspected of doing was telling the truth.
Then again, sometimes not. At one slaughterhouse by the border with Burkina Faso, a man came up to me unprompted and shouted enthusiastically “HEY! WANNA BUY A VULTURE???” So the intrigue wasn’t always necessary.
Hooded Vulture in Mole National Park Ghana. Photo by Nico Arcilla.
The final part of our tour was a visit to Mole National Park, where Hooded Vultures, White-headed Vultures, and White-backed Vultures, are all known to nest. Unfortunately, we didn't see any of these during our surveys, but we did get to see many charismatic species of mammal. Elephants, African porcupines, warthogs, and baboons are all easy to see in the park, which, along with its avian biodiversity, is a huge part of its appeal to ecotourists.
Red-throated Bee-eater (Merops bulocki) in Mole National Park Ghana. Photo by Grzegorz Walczak.
The visit was a stark example of West Africa's tourism potential. Though I had seen almost no other people from outside of West Africa in the rest of the country, the small lodge in the park was full of American, German, and French tourists interested in wildlife. The ecological and economic success of Mole National Park is a testament to what effective conservation could achieve in West Africa.
Abyssinian Roller (Coracias abyssinicus) in Mole National Park Ghana. Photo by Grzegorz Walczak.
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