Africa is currently suffering a vulture crisis. Throughout southern Africa, the threats driving vulture population declines are complex and dynamic, varying from one region to the next. Although habitat loss, persecution, and electrocutions on power lines are major threats, the decline of African vultures is largely due to direct and indirect poisoning. To address the highly dynamic threat landscape across southern Africa, the Endangered Wildlife Trusts (EWT) Birds of Prey Programme has spearheaded the establishment of Vulture Safe Zones (VSZs). A VSZ is a geographic area where we use targeted conservation measures to address the key threats to the relevant vulture species. We work directly with landowners and communities in these safe zones to reduce the impacts of threats such as poisoning and collisions or electrocutions with energy infrastructure. We engage with owners of large land portions and empower them to manage their properties in wildlife-friendly ways. In 2020, the EWT launched a series of VSZ projects across strategic sites in southern Africa. To date we have secured commitment from over 450 landowners and communities to becoming VSZs, comprising an area of over 2 million hectares, where we are working tirelessly to improve awareness and remove key threats to vultures, benefiting a host of other wildlife.

Even in VSZs, poisoning is the biggest threat to vultures. Illegal trade has seen thousands of vultures poisoned across Africa, devastating populations, and driving them rapidly towards extinction in the wild. Scavenging mammals including Lions, Hyaenas and Leopards are also severely impacted by poisoning. A key factor limiting the capacity to reduce or avoid the largescale loss of wildlife to poisoning, is our ability to locate and respond quickly to poisoning events. The early detection of a poison source, and the decontamination of a poisoning scene, radically reduces the further loss of wildlife. Fast action also allows response teams to save surviving wildlife and since early 2021, rapid response has led to the rescue and rehabilitation of over 100 vultures. Every bird counts.

To address this ominous threat in southern and east Africa, the EWT and its partners, has harnessed the natural sentinel and foraging behaviour of vultures to our advantage and coupled this with novel GPS-tracking technology; developing a pioneering rapid poisoning detection system, which we have called Eye in the Sky. Using GPS-tracked vultures, we have developed an effective monitoring system using both built-in GPS device activity sensors and post-hoc algorithms, that is able to rapidly alert us to vulture mortality, within an hour of death. This has important implications for triggering mortalities due to poisoning in poisoning hotspot areas, allowing the early detection of wildlife poisoning events. The early detection of a poisoned carcass or bait source, and the immediate decontamination of a poisoning scene, drastically reduces the further, unnecessary loss of wildlife. This system closely monitors the behavioral signatures, immobility and spatial clustering in GPS-tracked vultures in near real time, to remotely detect the presence of poison sources and feeding events associated with potentially poisoned-laced carcasses. Using this rapid detection system, the goal is to significantly reduce the impact of wildlife poisoning in southern Africa. The aim is to enhance law enforcement and response team capacity and efficiency through the rapid detection system.

Over the last five years, the EWT and its partners have been developing various monitoring and technology solutions to make their alert system practical on the frontline. We have developed a PostGIS environment with custom scripting to present notifications and/or near real-time information via a secure application programming interface (API) to various “front ends” and domain awareness platforms used in the landscape (e.g. WhatsApp, Email, EarthRanger) for direct integration with operational communications. In concert with this, we have set up an ever-growing network of GPS-tracked vultures across poisoning hotspots in southern and east Africa, which are actively surveying extensive wilderness areas that would otherwise be impossible to monitor. We currently have over 180 vultures of five different species deployed for this system and covering approximately 2 million square km, which are monitored in near real-time in EarthRanger software. These birds are pushing alerts through to various front-end platforms that are actively being used by response teams across Africa to react rapidly to poisoning events. More recently, efforts to improve the Eye in the Sky system has led to the merging of conservation efforts between a growing network of Africa-wide partnerships, as well as the integration of this system with features in MoveApps, which allows rapid integration, visualisation and monitoring of vulture feeding cluster alerts in EarthRanger.

We have a long term vision for our projects, and to keep our VSZ and Eye in the Sky projects alive is extremely costly. We require sustainable funding to keep our field officers active on the ground and to enable the expansion and implementation of this high impact conservation work across key sites of Africa. These funds are also needed to sustain Eye in the Sky system fine tuning and maintenance of our servers and API, to the continuous integration of new tracked vulture subjects and landscapes to the Eye in the Sky system. In addition to the costs needed to keep tracking units delivering tracking data to the system.