Data from carrion-eating birds is helping Israel’s army locate corpses around sites of the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters, said a wildlife expert involved in the project, Reuters reports.

Eagles, vultures and other birds of prey fitted with tracking devices have played a role in the search for human remains, said Ohad Hatzofe of Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority.

Hatzofe heads a programme which tracks endangered griffon vultures, which chiefly feed on dead animals, as well as eagles and other birds of prey which he said also eat carrion.

The programme has tagged hundreds of birds with GPS trackers to study their migratory patterns, feeding habits and environmental threats they face.

On October 23, one of them — a rare sea eagle which had returned to Israeli skies the day before after spending the summer in northern Russia — was found near Beeri, just outside the Gaza Strip.

“I sent my data” to the army, Hatzofe said. “They went to verify it and recovered four bodies,” he said, unable to reveal more about the location or identities of the corpses.

Hatzofe said data from a second bird, a Bonelli’s eagle, enabled the recovery of “other bodies inside Israel”.