As published by The Guardian (link to the full story is here):
"A German wildlife rescue project is deploying small aerial drones to find young deer hiding in tall grass and protect them from being shredded by combine harvesters cutting hay in spring.
According to project spokesman Rolf Stockum, the pilot scheme has shown great promise in spotting the young animals. About 100,000 of them fall victim in Germany every year to the large agricultural machines, he said on Friday."
Comments
Something that is being overlooked or at least not acknowledged by those who scoff at the idea of UAVs being effective in wildlife conservation is the rapid evolution of "drones" in the directions of increased capability and operating simplicity and decreased cost and size. The days of $25000 Hexacopters with accompanying three Pelican cases full of expensive "ground station" crap etc. are numbered. There are sub-two-ounce "toy" class quads available now for under $150 that have capabilities we only dreamed of two years ago. It is now quite reasonable to imagine a game warden in a couple of years taking a cheap palm-sized quad out of his backpack, pushing a single button on it and literally tossing it into the air, day or night, rain or shine, and then getting a look for the next half hour though a pair of goggles at every living creature within, say, a five mile circle. So, lets hear from the doomsayers about how that can't possibly work (since we've all known since the 1800s that heavier-than-air flight is impossible,,,).
I truly hope this proves to be a useful and effective method, it is certainly a positive use of UAVs.
It does seem to me that inexpensive Far IR cameras attached to the combine harvesters themselves might also be a good method of dealing with it (presuming the farmers were willing to stop the harvester to save a fawn).
And with the inexpensive Flir Iphone camera add on recently introduced I would think you might easily put together an early fawn (hot body) warning alarm for a tractor.
Of course you can use them on the UAVs too.
Just a thought.
Best Regards,
Gary
Excelent, I know someone who uses a cuad with a FLIR to find deer for his hunter friends during hunting season :)
Excellent! Great publicity for us, drones rescuing Bambi! Now we'll probably hear from a bunch of nattering nabobs of negativity who will tell us how corrupt, worthless, expensive and impossible this effort is (see my blog post of yesterday on drones vs. poaching in Kenya). Whether or not this approach turns out to be valuable in the long run, or whether the reporting is accurate, is beside the point - the publicity is invaluable at a time when there is a very real possibility that all UAVs in the US other than those operated by big corporations will be grounded.
100,000 is a terrible number! That is a shock to hear!