Across eastern and southern Africa, the Eye in the Sky Program, a major partnership with the Endangered Wildlife Trust and North Carolina Zoo, helps detect poisonings early by fitting vultures with GPS trackers. The team can see where birds gather and quickly spot unusual patterns that may signal a poisoning event. As a collective, this program brings together data from over 300 tagged vultures flying across 16 African countries and provides coverage over nearly 30% of the African continent. This is the scale at which we need to operate to save these wide-ranging scavengers. For instance, when a recent poisoning event was detected near a watering hole in Tanzania, rangers trained by our program moved quickly—cleaning the site, gathering evidence, and saving 15 vultures. Today, more than 425 rangers across Tanzania have been trained by our team to recognize and respond to wildlife poisoning incidents, helping stop deadly events before they spread further.
Ranked the #3 priority raptor species for conservation in the world, the California Condor’s recovery mirrors the lessons learned in Asia and Africa. For the full story of three decades of condor recovery, see Page 16.
Nancy Arehart
California Condors: A North American Parallel
In North America, the California Condor faced a different toxic threat: lead. By the 1980s, only 22 California Condors remained. Through captive breeding, hands-on field work, and partnership with hunting groups and wildlife agencies to voluntarily reduce lead on the landscape, the population has rebounded to more than 560 birds, with over 360 flying free across Arizona, Utah, California, Oregon, and Mexico. This lesson is the same one we’ve learned in Africa and Asia: when we understand what’s killing vultures and work together to address it, recovery is possible. But it requires long-term commitment. One Global Mission From Asia to Africa to the Americas, vultures have faced—and continue to face—steep declines. TPF’s response has been steady and consistent. First, we work to understand what’s harming them. Then we partner with local communities, organizations, and governments to fix it. Whether doing research to identify the hidden drug killer in Asia, partnering to voluntarily decrease the use of lead ammunition in Arizona, or educating pastoralists on safe livestock management practices in Kenya, the approach remains the same— find the problem and work together to solve it. These are your dollars at work.
Noah Mchafu
Across Kenya and Tanzania, our teams are working with communities and rangers to combat vulture poisoning. Critical support from the National Geographic Society is helping us expand that work in Kenya and advancing new research on threats to raptors across Africa.
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