Only five of 11 feeding sites around Chad's capital drew Hooded Vultures in a six-month count

Hooded Vultures historically lived alongside people and helped dispose of their waste, and slaughterhouses are now among the few places they can reliably find food, according to the research team ^[17]. Farcha is the largest slaughterhouse around N'Djamena. It kills 100 to 250 cattle a day, and no vultures attended it on either visit ^[7]. Available food is usually one of the most reliable predictors of where wildlife turns up, the team wrote, but in this survey it did not predict where the vultures were ^[6].

The birds tracked greenery and quiet instead. They were more common at greener sites and at sites with fewer people, and the site with the most vultures, Dourbali, was the one farthest from the capital ^[8]. The results, published in Frontiers in Bird Science, rest on counts at 11 sites plus interviews ^[2][1]. That design can show the pattern but cannot establish its cause. A member of the team, writing on phys.org, allowed that the birds might simply dislike disturbance, but wrote that "for a species with a history as a human commensal, this behavior seems contrary to expectation" ^[9].

The interviews offer a second explanation: poisoning ^[10]. Slaughterhouses at Farcha, Dourbali, Gueli and Mandelia were identified as poisoning sites, and five livestock ministry officials and two wildlife officials confirmed those observations ^[11]. Dourbali is on that list and also held the most birds, so the poisoning reports alone do not separate the empty sites from the occupied ones ^[8][11].

Elsewhere in West Africa the persecution is better documented. Vultures there are hunted, often with poison or traps set at slaughterhouses, and sold to buyers who believe sacrificing them brings protection or success in business or politics ^[18]. The team calls this trade, for Vodun rituals, a major driver of the region's declines ^[18]. In Badou, Togo, past records noted more than 60 Hooded Vultures roosting in one tree. The team found none, and residents said poachers had killed them all with meat baited with fishhooks ^[15]. At a large Ghanaian slaughterhouse with enough carrion for hundreds of birds, the author saw a single Hooded Vulture ^[16].

The thing this survey doesn't tell you is whether Chad's vultures are declining. Chad is considered a potential stronghold for Africa's critically endangered vultures, but before this work there was very little information on how many it actually held ^[13]. The 113-bird estimate is therefore a starting point, with no earlier count to compare it against ^[4][13]. For scale, it is about 1.4 times the 83 birds the team counted at a single slaughterhouse in northern Togo ^[5][2].

I'd expect protection aimed mainly at habitat to leave much of this untouched. Habitat loss is on the team's list of threats, alongside food shortages from wildlife declines, electrocution and poisoning ^[14]. But the Chad sites without birds include the one with the most food, and every site identified for poisoning is a slaughterhouse ^[7][11].