News and Stories

Did you know that 50% of the proceeds from Behind-the-Scenes tours at the Cincinnati Zoo goes to conservation? Our Hangin’ with the Hippos tour contributes to both hippo and vulture conservation! Thanks to the immense popularity of the hippo tours, we felt we had more than enough to share, so the Africa department decided to split the proceeds raised from those tours and began a partnership with the vulture conservation organization, Vulpro in 2018.

As always, the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden loves to support organizations that empower communities and support coexistence. Vulpro is based in South Africa and does both of those things and so much more. The dedicated staff at Vulpro rehabilitate orphaned and injured vultures, participate in research, population supplementation, conservation breeding, education and awareness, breeding monitoring and biology and recently began focusing on breeding in Zoos for release into the wild. They actively work with the community through on-site educational programs and tours, a Vulture Champions program where they engage schools in areas surrounding vulture colonies, give talks at all sorts of community events, work with landowner engagement and support volunteers and post graduate students!

Vulpro was founded by an amazing woman named Kerri Wolter, who began working in vulture conservation in a unique way. She fell in love with watching birds through her window at an office job, began helping with vulture study groups and eventually took in a vulture chick that wasn’t doing well and nursed him back to health. That vulture chick, named Percy, is still with Kerri to this day. Percy played a huge role in all the lifesaving work Kerri continues to do, she had him living at her house and began taking him to schools to teach students about vultures. That led to Kerri deciding that she wanted to do even more. Long story short, she now runs two different sites in South Africa that support vulture conservation in a huge way.

Vulpro was founded by an amazing woman named Kerri Wolter, who began working in vulture conservation in a unique way. She fell in love with watching birds through her window at an office job, began helping with vulture study groups and eventually took in a vulture chick that wasn’t doing well and nursed him back to health. That vulture chick, named Percy, is still with Kerri to this day. Percy played a huge role in all the lifesaving work Kerri continues to do, she had him living at her house and began taking him to schools to teach students about vultures. That led to Kerri deciding that she wanted to do even more. Long story short, she now runs two different sites in South Africa that support vulture conservation in a huge way.

Vulture populations are declining in most of the world and in several African species there has been an incredible 95% population decrease in just the last few decades. Vulture numbers are dropping due to several factors including poisonings, power line collisions and electrocutions, lack of nesting sites, collisions with wind turbines, toxic veterinary drugs for livestock and even a shortage of food in some areas. Vulpro is working to rehabilitate and release birds that are found suffering from many of those issues. One of their newer and exciting efforts involve a breeding program where non releasable vultures that they have rescued are able to pair up and produce chicks that can then be released into the wild. Those chicks are fitted with GPS trackers and Vulpro will be able to get even more data from them, while they live their lives as wild vultures. The money Vulpro received this year from the Cincinnati Zoo was used to finance trackers that are fitted on vultures released from both the breeding program and vultures that were rehabbed and releasable. Over the last few years we have been able to support VulPro in a variety of ways, including supporting the impact evaluation of VulPro’s community education programs around vultures with survey design expertise. We can’t wait to continue growing this relationship with this amazing conservation organization!