Hi Tom,
There's been a fairly recent thread on this, but sometimes I think my emails
don't get to the whole group.
Put simply I cannot imagine a better way to count waders than with the right
UAV. One thing I would add is that birds learn well, and are lazy - if a
potential threat associated with a stimulus never eventuates, then they soon
start to tolerate whatever the "potential threat" was. Fish farmers and
airports have been battling this tendency for decades.
Cheers,
Eric
My original response from October last year:
I have flown an electric remote controlled helicopter near terns and waders and
they watch it with the same kind of look they give a distant raptor - ie head
cocked slightly to the side. When flown up beside a kestrel, its flight
distance was about 5 m - that is, the kestrel hardly seemd concerned, and
common passerines that sit on wires like peewees don't seem to care about being
overflown by it.
I think RC helicopters would be the best way of getting very accurate counts of
shorebirds. You wouldn't need to get above them, and disturbance would be much
less than approaching a mob of birds from a distance. I have not yet used our
machine "in anger" for large shorebird counts, but I wish I had it in a
previous life doing counts for an airport. The counts would have been
significantly more accurate.
I very much doubt a raptor or any other bird would accidentally run into it,
though I have had woodswallows get quite close (2-3 m) in an obvious
attacking-type behaviour similar to what they might do with a raptor. Their
calls were woodswallow alarm calls, but they never connected, suggesting to me
that they don't find the helicopter as threatening as a goshawk, corvid, falcon
etc, or perhaps they could clearly see the turning blades and just wanted to
avoid something so unfamiliar. The machine I use would probably seriously
injure or kill a small bird, but you can put your hand into its rotors and
usually get nothing more than a "papercut". The machine I use is electric, so
noise is pretty much limited to rotor noise.
More powerful machines, especially those with combustion engines, could cause a
lot more damage in the case of rotor strikes, and are obviously much noisier.
Eric Vanderduys
Technical Officer
CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences
Phone: +61 7 4753 8529 | Fax: +61 7 4753 8600 | Mobile: 0437 330 961
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-----Original Message-----
From:
On Behalf Of Tom Tarrant
Sent: Friday, 1 March 2013 12:45 PM
To: Carl Clifford
Cc: Birding-Aus Aus
Subject: Relaxation of UAV rules
I wonder if anyone has done a study of the effects of drones on wildlife?
Would birds equate them with raptors?
Tom
On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 12:29 PM, Carl Clifford <>wrote:
> The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones as they are often
> called, for applications such as bird and other wildlife surveys has
> been somewhat limited in Australia, because of licensing problems. The
> Civil Aviation Authority has just relaxed licensing rules for UAVs of
> 2 Kg or less. this will make the use of UAVs for environmental purposes much
> more practicable.
> See http://www.abc.net.au/news/**2013-03-01/drones-set-for-**
> large-scale-commercial-take-**off/4546556<http://www.abc.net.au/news/2
> 013-03-01/drones-set-for-large-scale-commercial-take-off/4546556>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Carl Clifford
> ==============================**=
>
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>
--
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Tom Tarrant
Kobble Creek, Qld
http://www.aviceda.org
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