Illegal trade has seen thousands of vultures poisoned across Africa, devastating populations and driving them rapidly toward extinction in the wild. To address the ominous threat of wildlife poisoning in southern and east Africa, the Endangered Wildlife Trust and its partners have 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 is called Eye in the Sky. Using GPS-tracked vultures, they have developed an effective monitoring system using both built-in GPS device activity sensors and spatial algorithms that are 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 reduce the impact of wildlife poisoning in southern Africa significantly. 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 developed various monitoring and technology solutions to make their alert system practical on the frontline. The EWT currently has over 180 vultures of five different species deployed for this system and covering approximately 2 million km2, 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.