Help our ‘super smart’ endangered birds

THE isiZulu-speaking areas of South Africa have the largest population of Southern ground hornbills after the Kruger National Park.

So says Limpopo-based ornithologist Lucy Kemp, who this week won the international Whitley Award for her work on the large black, red-faced birds that, in half a generation, have gone from endangered to critically endangered.

The belief among traditional Zulus that the bird they call iNsingizi – or the onomatopoeic Ingududu – brings rain, has been their saving grace.

“For subsistence farmers they’re most important,” said Kemp. “However, there are areas where the traditions have eroded.”

Her non-governmental organisation, the Mabula Hornbill Project, has Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi as its patron and, this week, the Inkatha Freedom Party was quick to congratulate Kemp.

The Whitley Awards are presented annually to individuals from the Global South by UK-based charity the Whitley Fund for Nature.

Kemp is one of six conservationists to be recognised in 2021 for their commitment to conserving some of the planet’s most endangered species and spectacular natural habitats.

Electricity pylons, poisons, harvesting for traditional medicine and habitat changes in the face of climate change have been a threat to the Southern ground hornbill, which Kemp says “behave more like primates than birds, and are super smart”.

“They have social complexities within their groups and they play, even as adults.”

Donald Leitch, who used to farm near Melmoth and has worked with Kemp’s project, recalled how he had hand-reared a sick juvenile he named Boetie that ended up living with his geese. “After a while a group of three or four hornbills landed in the fencedoff area where it lived and spent a day with it, obviously trying to persuade him to leave with them, but it did not.

“Weeks later two families of hornbills arrived and Boetie left with them. They must have persuaded him.”

The NGO’s much-praised work has involved re-introducing the species to places that have been depopulated, building artificial nests to accommodate them in the absence of tree

hollows where trees have disappeared, monitoring, research, getting projects going in the region beyond SA, and education.

The Mabula Hornbill Project has developed a network of citizen scientists outside the conventional community of birders, said Kemp.

They include tractor drivers and bus drivers who go to less-travelled places where Southern ground hornbills might be seen, all connected on a WhatsApp group.

Visits to schools have also been important: children are taught about the bird and its cultural importance, and how to limit damage to their classrooms by the birds.

“When they were away from school, the hornbills would come on to the school grounds, see their reflections in the windows and peck them (thinking it was an intruder on its territory),” said Leitch, recalling visits with Kemp to schools in his area.

“Children would then rub a mix of ash and water on the windows before going on holiday so the ground hornbills would not see their reflections.”

Kemp estimates that there are about 600 families of ground hornbills in the country, each with a breeding female.

Some of the £40000 (more than R794 000) she was awarded will go towards making artificial nests.

Whitley Awards trustee Sir David Attenborough has narrated an account of Kemp’s work on a flip clip that can be found at http://bit.ly/HornbillVideo