BEARDED VULTURE POPULATION AND HABITAT VIABILITY ...

Population and Habitat Viability Assessment: Bearded Vulture (Gypaetus barbatus)
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8. Distribution and population status
Distribution: The species is distributed from Europe and North Africa in the west to Asia in
the east and Africa in the south (Brown 1997a). Within Africa, the nominate race (i.e. G. b.
barbatus) is only found in the mountains of the north-west. South of the Sahara, in Africa,
there are two isolated populations, one in Ethiopia (ca. 4000 pairs) and Kenya, Uganda and
Tanzania (ca. 50 pairs), another in southern Africa (< 200 pairs). The southern African deme
has a breeding range of about 35,000 km 2 and a foraging range of about 100,000 km 2 (Brown
1997a).
This deme is restricted to the high mountain ranges of the Kingdom of Lesotho and to
the mountainous regions of South Africa in three provinces: the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal
and the Eastern Cape (including the former Transkei), with almost all sightings at altitudes
greater than 1 500 m (Brown 1997a). Though formerly it was known from the Cape Fold
Mountains, in the southern and western Cape, at altitudes less than 1 000 m (Brown 1997a;
Layard 1867: 2), and even near the coast (collected at Inanda, KwaZulu-Natal by Thomas
Ayres - Gurney 1864).
The distribution of the entire southern African deme was rather crudely mapped in the
last quarter of the twentieth century, based on an intuitive understanding of the species habitat
requirements but not using any systematic bio-geographic data (e.g. Steyn 1982: 9 ff; Maclean
1985: 106 ff). More accurate maps were made for South Africa, but excluding Lesotho, at
about the same time and also giving some idea of range contraction since European
settlement of the sub-continent (e.g. Boshoff, Brooke and Crowe 1978; Brooke 1984).
Regional distributions were mapped in the 1970s and 1980s for the then South African
Provinces of Natal (Cyrus and Robson 1980), Orange Free State (Earlé and Grobler 1987),
Cape (Boshoff, Vernon and Brooke 1983) and Transvaal (Tarboton and Allan 1984); see
below for details.
By 1940 the Bearded Vulture had disappeared from the southern and south-western
Cape and by 1970 from the Eastern Cape (Brown 1997a).
The first attempt at a comprehensive distribution map for the southern African deme was
composed of two elements: a breeding distribution (in 72 ¼ ° ¼° by grid-cells) and a total
distribution (in 79 ¼ ° ¼° by grid-cells) (Brown 1992).
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