In a recent Viewpoint, Santangeli (2026) calls for integrating real-time mortality alerts into telemetry programs for vultures and other scavengers to combat the elevated poisoning crisis. We strongly support this call and highlight that such an approach is already being implemented at scale. Over the past decade, Endangered Wildlife Trust, The Peregrine Fund, and North Carolina Zoo have operationalized such an approach for African vultures through our Eye in the Sky program (EITS), a near-real-time mortality monitoring network spanning 15 countries, more than 400 tagged birds, and more than 30 partner organizations. Since mid-2023, EITS has detected 46 wildlife poisoning events and 30 poison baits/sources across our southern African project sites, enabling reduced mortality, site decontamination, rescue of animals, and improved opportunities for evidence collection and enforcement. This has contributed to the prevention of substantial secondary mortalities, with a conservative calculation of ∼2500 vultures saved since inception. Building on this experience, we outline key operational challenges and solutions to translate alerts into effective action. First, large-scale, long-term, partner-driven programs inevitably require working across multiple tag manufacturers. Tags can differ in transmission frequency, download structure, accessory sensors, and battery characteristics and alerts must account for these differences to function reliably. Freely available cloud-based databases and analysis platforms such as EarthRanger (ER) and Movebank provide important infrastructure to integrate and customize needs by tag type (Wall et al. 2024). Second, alerts must be automated and multi-metric to ensure accuracy and use. Standard mortality alerts based on displacement can generate high false-positive rates. EITS incorporates additional tag data from accessory sensors into alert metrics. ER allows near-real-time alerts to be delivered via web interface, email, or WhatsApp. Third, technological solutions are only effective if alerts reach the right people. With African vultures ranging widely, EITS depends on a broad network of over 30 partners spanning approximately 9 million km2 of southern and eastern Africa (Kane et al. 2022). Geographic alert-sharing capabilities allow mortality alerts to be shared directly with appropriate partners based on geographic proximity, regardless of where an animal was originally tagged. Finally, the ability to reach a mortality site quickly can be as important as its detection. Models demonstrate that intervention within hours is necessary to reduce mortality during poisoning events (Murn and Botha 2018; Curk et al. 2025). Our program's success illustrates how near-real-time alerts, paired with coordinated response capacity, translate directly into conservation impact. While staffing, vehicles, terrain, weather, and security conditions can limit the capacity to respond consistently at this speed, near-real-time responses add value by informing our understanding of the causes, motivations, and rates of mortality. EITS is ever-growing and we welcome new partners interested in using it on the ground or sharing additional vulture telemetry data. EITS provides an operational example of how real-time mortality monitoring can be implemented at scale, and we hope these experiences can help inform broader adoption across systems and species. Telemetry data could provide conservation benefits for many species if the barriers to operationalizing these systems can be overcome.
Kendall et al. (Sun,) studied this question.