Saving Nigeria's vultures
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Welcome to The Fifth Floor from the BBC World Service with me, Farinak Amidi. The BBC World Service broadcasts in 45 languages around the world. Our job here at The Fifth Floor is to bring you the best of those stories in English and to also get you closer to the extraordinary work our journalists do. Coming up on the fifth floor, we hear about the Russian vigilante group who takes it upon themselves to uphold Putin's so-called traditional Russian values.
They're rather Orthodox, so they have good relations with the Russian Orthodox Church. They, of course, pro-war, so they support Russian war against Ukraine. They are against LGBT people. They're actively promoting the abortion ban in Russia. They don't like being labeled as nationalists or far-right. They call themselves patriots, but their rhetoric could be described as nationalist.
And we hear about the changing reputation of the last empress of Vietnam.
She was truly ways ahead of her times. It represents a brand new style of woman back then as she was smart, fluent in French, confident, yet still deeply respectful of her roots. She was never just the wife of the king.
But first, when it comes to conservation, the cute, cuddly and beautiful all win the day. We can all get behind a project to protect pangolins or pandas. It's not so easy to get the public's attention when it comes to animals that are perceived as weird or creepy or downright unpleasant. The vulture, traditionally associated with death and carrion, falls into this unlucky group, with roughly 70% of vultures globally under threat of extinction. Nigeria's vultures are no exception. BBC West Africa journalist Makuochi Okofor, based in Lagos, has been investigating this story and he's here to talk about his findings. So when you were a child, Makuochi, how common was it to see vultures?
It was actually quite common. So I grew up in the, I didn't grow up in Lagos, which is a big city. In a smaller city, vultures were quite common in Enugu, southeastern part of Nigeria. I remember when I go to market with my mom and she goes to pick up meat in the abattoir, you would see vultures literally like hanging on the roof, playing around and all that. But I've realized that I don't see them quite often anymore. While I haven't been to Enugu so recently because I left there a couple of years ago, I just noticed that I haven't seen vultures almost at all here in Lagos.
So how serious is the decline of population of vultures according to conservationists?
The conservationists that I've been speaking with said it's actually very serious, especially here in Nigeria and across West Africa. They've talked about things moving to actually receiving global attention and not for vultures being labelled as critically endangered in Nigeria. So it's quite serious.
Why are they so important ecologically?
Think of vultures as trash movers. Now, imagine in your street, People put out trash, but there is nobody to move the trash. Everybody's going to be sick in a couple of weeks. Now, in the forest, in the wild, when carcasses die, when animals die, or when some animals hunt what they need, pick up probably just the head or the heart and they leave the rest of it, There's a potential that everything is going to get rotten and perhaps get washed into water that people drink or spread diseases. But vultures are very special because they don't just eat flesh. They actually eat bone. They have such a complex digestive system that is so dangerous. acidic that it can swallow bones and it doesn't hurt them.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:16
2
How does the episode introduce the conservation crisis facing Nigeria’s vultures?
6:16–19:17
3
How common were vultures in Nigeria when the reporter was a child and what has changed?
19:17–27:19
4
Why are vultures ecologically important and what happens if they disappear?
27:19–28:55