VULTURES NAMIBIA

The flamboyant French traveller and naturalist Francois Le Vaillant killed a vulture (with the butt of his rifle!) in southern Namibia and wrote about it in his travel journal published in 1795. Thanks to a German translation of the book in 1796 the bird became known to science as the Lappet-faced Vulture! In the centuries that followed, explorers, traders and missionaries published accounts of their adventures in Namibia and one of them, Charles John Andersson, wrote the first "guidebook" to the birds of Namibia titled "Notes on the birds of Damara Land and adjacent countries of South West Africa", published post-humously in 1872. During the colonial time expeditions to collect biological specimens, mainly for museums, were conducted but proper scientific study of Namibia's avifauna only started after the First World War and it concentrated mostly on description and distribution of the avifauna. Dedicated studies on Namibia's vultures would only start much later. In the late 1960s the..