ANKARA

Guinea-Bissau has become a "vulture graveyard" after estimated 2,000 vultures died, the world’s biggest ever vulture morality, according to a conservation organization.

"With the political turmoil in the country and the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has been even more difficult and slow to respond accordingly to the circumstances," Vulture Conservation Foundation (VCF) said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Unprecedented" hooded vulture deaths in the country started in early February with 200 fatalities and sharply increased to at least 1,603 confirmed cases, especially in the eastern part of the country, but the NGO suspects that the number of death vultures could exceed 2,000.

“Guinea-Bissau holds one of the healthiest populations of this African species, with some estimates suggesting the country holds more than a fifth of the continent's global population of Hooded Vultures, but events of this scale will have adverse effects on their national but also regional West African population”, said Jose Tavares, the head of the VCF.

Along with the VCF, International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Vulture Specialist Group (VSG) and BirdLife International, as well as authorities in the country have been working to enlighten the incident.

According to reports and some witnesses on the ground, the vultures were killed intentionally via poison baits due to the demand for ritual use of the raptors, the VCF said.

"Vulture carcasses have been collected and sent to Lisbon [the capital of Portugal] with one of the last planes that flew out of Guinea-Bissau before the global lock-down imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and toxicological analysis are now being carried out in Lisbon university," the group added.

Mentioning that mass poisonings in Africa are common, it stressed that populations of some African species have declined by 80% over the past 30 years.

Founded in 2009, the Vulture Conservation Foundation is an international NGO working for the conservation of European vulture species -- bearded vultures, griffon vultures, cinereous vultures, and Egyptian vultures.