That’s the question and most would answer, no, but sheep farmers in the province claim that a flock of killer buzzards are wiping out their flocks.
Sheep farmers are having a tough enough time of it keeping their animals alive with artificial feed, owing to the drought and lack of pastures, without something out of a Hitchcock film swooping down and killing their sheep.
Add to that that 800 goatherds protested outside a milk factory (Lactalis) over the prices being offered by the dairy sector for their milk: 50 cents a litre.
Nonsense, respond scientists/biologists: buzzards are scavengers not birds of prey. Just because you’ve got a handful of buzzards feeding on the carcass of one of your sheep doesn’t mean that they killed it.
But let’s look at the controversial incidents. On Saturday the 1st in Orce where a farmer lost several sheep or in Atarfe where a farmer lost some foals.
If this were the case, why is it happening? Well ecologists and farming associations lay the blame firmly at the door of the Junta for stopping farmers from leaving carcasses where they find them, out in the fields – this goes back to a decision made during the Mad Cows epidemic. Actually, it was an EU directive but the Junta imposes it still.
The Junta does, however, permit carcasses being left out in areas where there are large buzzard populations.
According to the Junta, their Plan de Protección de las Especies Necrófagas reduced the strong measures put in place by the EU directive. This was done by establishing buzzard-colony areas in the northeast of the province of Granada where two factors are met: intensive sheep farming and a rugged topography with mountain crags; i.e., high formations favoured by buzzards and eagles because of the natural air currents.
Junta bigwig, Borja Nebot states categorically that buzzards do not kill their food and they are not attracted to the scent of blood as they have no olfactory sense – they are guided by their keen sight. In the case of Orce, the sheep were lost in an enclosure where pregnant sheep are kept to give birth.
Olfactory means ‘sense of smell,’ and let’s face it, who needs one when you’ve got your hooter stuck in the intestines of a rotting carcass?
Sr. Nebot pointed out that in the case of Orce it has not been demonstrated that the ten adult sheep and three lambs were actually killed by the buzzards.
Furthermore buzzards are not “designed” to kill, hence their long necks and beaks for hooking around… A professor at the Granada University agrees with the Junta, pointing out that buzzards simply do not possess the ‘weapons’ to kill, such as talons.
On the other side of the argument, the Orce sheep farmer, Antonio Torres, claims that it was a flock of some 200 buzzards: he had put the sheep in the pen around two in the afternoon and returned at four, alerted by neighbours, to find the carnage taking place. He said that they managed to rescue a few that had huddled in one corner of the pen.
Since the alleged attack the Orce Town Hall has requested permission from the Junta to create a offal/carcass dump in an abandoned quarry within the province to act as a feeding ground for the buzzards
Finally, the Spokesman for Ecologists in Action, Javier Egea, said that in desperate times, three of four buzzards can work together to bring down a lamb. He considers that it is ridiculous that dumps for offal and carcasses should be set up rather than just letting nature sort things out by putting things back as they were; i.e. leaving dead animals where they fall, in the fields.
(News: Orce, Altiplano, Granada, Andalucia)