- A new study has found that hornbills, vultures and eagles are being hunted for bushmeat in Cameroon in much greater numbers than previously thought.
- Researchers estimate that people living around the proposed Ebo National Park in Cameroon’s Littoral region consumed an average of 29 hornbills and eight raptors per month.
- But they remain unsure how the current levels of hunting are affecting the bird populations, given that so little is known about the latter.
Hornbills, vultures and eagles are being hunted for bushmeat in Cameroon in much greater numbers than previously thought, a new study has found.
Previous research has shown that relatively few birds are sold in Cameroon’s markets compared to mammals and reptiles. However, market surveys can be biased toward commercially valuable wildlife, missing animals that are killed by hunters for consumption in their hunting camps, Robin C. Whytock, a doctoral researcher at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and his colleagues found in a study published in 2016. Whytock’s team surveyed discarded animal remains at hunting camps in the Ebo forest (proposed Ebo National Park) in Cameroon’s Littoral region, and found that people were hunting about three hornbills every month on average.
But that seems to have been an underestimate, Whytock concluded in a recent study published in Biological Conservation.
Through a survey of 240 men from 19 villages around the Ebo forest, Whytock and his colleagues estimated that people in the region were consuming an average of 29 hornbills and eight raptors per month.
The researchers worry that large birds like hornbills could be especially sensitive to hunting since these birds reproduce slowly and have slow population growth. But they’re not sure how the current levels of hunting affect Ebo forest’s birds.
“It is difficult to quantify the implications of these numbers without having population estimates for the affected species,” Whytock told Mongabay. “My guess is that hornbills and raptors especially are declining in Cameroon’s unprotected forests, but we need to do more work on this.”
However, identifying the number of birds that are killed is the first step to understanding how bushmeat hunting can affect birds like hornbills and eagles, Whytock added.