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
Cheers,
Carl Clifford ===============================
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Comments
2 responses to “Relaxation of UAV rules”
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 eric.vanderduys@csiro.au | http://www.csiro.au | http://www.csiro.au/people/Eric.Vanderduys.html Address: CSIRO, PMB PO, Aitkenvale, Qld 4814. Deliveries: CSIRO, ATSIP, Bld 145 James Cook Drive, James Cook University Douglas Campus, Townsville Qld 4814, AUSTRALIA
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I wonder if anyone has done a study of the effects of drones on wildlife? Would birds equate them with raptors?
Tom