The unwitting environmentalists in the fight against poachers: Vultures

The African white-backed is a reliable homebody. Baldheaded, stern-eyed, a white-backed can be counted on to circle the vast savannahs of Murchison Falls National Park wearing a high-tech tracking device that alerts Ugandan rangers to poaching incidents.

The Rüppell’s griffon vulture, though also bald and stern, is another story. Even if it doesn’t peck your eye out while you’re strapping the tracker to its back, more likely than not it will immediately depart Ugandan airspace and disappear into Congo, Sudan or even Chad.

“They’re finding better carcasses there," surmises Charles Tumwesigye, the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s deputy director for field operations. “They’re not interested in our problems."

Such are the challenges of a new effort to fight illegal hunting in East Africa by literally harnessing artificial intelligence to a bird whose natural intelligence tells it to spend all day, every day, scanning for dead animals.

The vulture project is helping bring Murchison Falls back from the brink after decades of rampant poaching of elephants, hippos, Cape buffalo and other wildlife. The AI-infused trackers give rangers real-time information about how the vultures are behaving—making a quick snack, for instance, of bits of antelope the lions left behind or squabbling for days over a snared hippo—and therefore how poachers are behaving.

“It gives us supercool insights into the daily life of a vulture," says Jörg Melzheimer, senior researcher at Berlin’s Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

The institute developed the tracking technology and has tagged five vultures in Murchison and 15 more in other Ugandan national parks. The Leibniz team is even testing vulture-mounted cameras.

British colonial authorities first set aside Murchison Falls, a 1,500-square-mile expanse, as a game reserve in 1926. It was designated a national park in 1952.

Teddy Roosevelt hunted in Murchison Falls. Scenes from the Bogart/Hepburn classic “The African Queen" were filmed in the park. Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary survived a plane crash in Murchison in 1954, then another one when the rescue plane that picked them up caught fire on takeoff.

In the 1970s, the park began a long decline. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin invited fellow African dictators to hunt lion and leopard hunt there. Tanzanian soldiers who spearheaded Amin’s overthrow survived on bush meat from the park.

Rebels led by current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni ate what they killed during the Ugandan Bush War of the 1980s; even ranger Kulu Haruna Kirya, now the park’s top law-enforcement officer, says he hunted for food there when he was a teenage rebel. For decades the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal cultlike group, battled Ugandan troops and poached animals in the park until being ousted in the mid-2000s.

The result was a catastrophic decline in wildlife. Elephants, which numbered some 12,000 before 1973, dropped to some 500 by 2005, according to park officials. The Cape buffalo population plunged to 11,000 from 30,000 during the same period. Hippos, hunted for their teeth and meat, numbered some 1,300 in 2023, down from 12,000 before 1973.

“It was industrial levels of poaching," says Michael Douglas Keigwin, founder of the Uganda Conservation Foundation, a British charity working with the Uganda Wildlife Authority to protect the country’s parks.

Over the past decade, the foundation has financed some 20 new ranger stations in Murchison and provided boats to patrol the Nile.

The result has been a resurgence of wildlife. Murchison’s population of Ugandan kob, an antelope, jumped from about 9,300 in 2005 to 142,000 in 2023. The park’s stock of endangered Rothschild’s giraffe climbed from 245 to nearly 2,000.

Some international smuggling rings operate in Uganda, mainly trafficking in elephant ivory, hippo teeth and scales of the critically endangered pangolin, sold as male-enhancement products in Asia. In November, authorities arrested four Chinese nationals in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, allegedly with two skinned pangolins and 21 pounds of scales in the fridge.

But authorities say most poaching in Murchison is done by people from nearby villages, who are both desperately poor and come from generations of bush-meat hunters. Villagers make snares from steel belts stripped out of used tires. They sell them to middlemen, who sell them to poachers, who sell bush meat to villagers.

Poachers contribute some profits to a mutual-defense fund. If one gets arrested—rangers made 540 arrests in the first 11 months of 2024—he can tap the fund to hire a lawyer he could never afford on his own, according to Denis Turyaheebwa, project officer for the Uganda Conservation Foundation.

“It’s an ecosystem," Turyaheebwa says.

Park managers try to woo villagers by offering mango and jackfruit saplings and hiring local youths as scouts, a sort of starter ranger. Twenty percent of park revenue—Murchison gets 150,000 visitors a year—goes to build schools and other infrastructure in nearby hamlets.

But locals wryly refer to Murchison as “the World Bank," because it is stuffed with resources they consider rightfully theirs. “They strongly believe if they don’t get to take the fish, they should take the kob," says Chief Warden Fred Kizza.

Enter the vultures, which can spot a carcass from more than 2 miles away. Scientists at the Leibniz Institute thought up the idea of combining the birds’ innate drive to locate carrion with the park’s need to find poached animals in hopes of tracing poachers.

The tracking devices use AI to analyze the vulture’s behavior and marry it to location data. The devices, for instance, can tell whether the bird is circling for an extended period, preening, drinking, hopping on a carcass or arguing over carrion access rights with another vulture. The device assesses whether the vulture is on a known lion’s turf, where an animal’s death is more likely cat-related than poacher-related.

When the AI decides the vulture is likely feeding on a large poached animal, it alerts rangers, who dispatch a response team. Earth Ranger phones—developed by the foundation set up by Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder—allow rangers to see where snares have been found, patrols are under way and ranger ambushes have been set.

Someday, the AI program could decide whether to turn on a bird’s carrion cam, to better help rangers assess from afar what killed the animal.

In one case in 2023, the operations center alerted a ranger sergeant that a tagged vulture had been hanging out in one place for more than a day. Rangers found a buffalo killed by a snare. Poachers had already cut off the meat and fled, but rangers retrieved some 40 un-tripped snares from the area.

The tagging process itself is risky. In the early morning, the scientists search for a lion’s kill or poached animal, and set a fishing-line snare near the carcass.

Senior vultures are often wise to the trick. Younger vultures, however, are risk-takers and once one of them lunges in for a bite, a frenzy follows.

When a vulture steps into the trap, the scientists, wearing heavy gloves, run to the scene and secure the bird. Vultures have a nasty bite and don’t like to be handled. Melzheimer, from the Leibniz Institute, knows of two “members of the vulture community" badly injured trying to subdue vultures; one lost an eye, another a finger.

The scientists slip a hood over the bird’s head to calm it down, then fit the tag like a backpack.

It took the scientists a few tries to figure out that not all vultures are up to the task. One newly tagged Rüppell’s flew the coop, crossing into South Sudan and eventually turning up in Chad. “That’s 1,500 kilometers as the crow flies," says Melzheimer.

Scientists prefer to work with African white-backed vultures. “The white-backed are quite lazy," says Turyaheebwa. “They just hang out in this park and look for carcasses."

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com and Nicholas Bariyo at nicholas.bariyo@wsj.com