Rick Steven was surveying the area at the St Ives mine in Australia’s Goldfields region with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), when an angry eagle attacked his drone and sent it crashing down from the sky.
Drones may be the delivery boys of the future, but there’s still a few hurdles before we can get there— laws governing drone flight in populated areas, restrictions on altitude and the like. In addition, there might be a few other problems to contend with as well, as one geographical surveyor found out.
Rick Steven was surveying the area at the St Ives mine in Australia’s Goldfields region with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), when an angry eagle attacked his drone and sent it crashing down from the sky. Stevens posted a video of the August 2015 encounter from his drone camera and it’s been viewed over 6,000,000 times. And far from being a one-off incident, he found his drones being repeatedly attacked by the territorial birds of prey. The situation has forced Stevens to think out of the box.
Because of the threat of another creature encroaching on its hunting grounds, the eagles have been responding by dive-bombing the drones, and literally kicking them out of the sky. Not so much of a problem for a drone enthusiast, but Steven uses the UAV’s to make 3D maps of the terrain, as well as to monitor weather conditions to warn the mine workers in case of danger. Each of the drones costs about $7,000, with an equal price for the cameras attached to them. So, on the advice of an avian rehabilitation centre, Steven attempted to camouflage his drones to look like baby eagles, something he was told the eagles wouldn’t see as a threat.
Unfortunately, this new trick worked only for about 50 flights before the wedge-tailed eagles figured out the ruse and began attacking once more. “I know the eagles love to fly on thermals,” he told ABC News. “Because they’re a big heavy bird, and the more thermal activity there is, the easy it is for them to fly. Thermals activate during the hottest part of the day — which is why we’re flying in the morning now,” he explained. So far, Steven has lost more than 10 of the drones to the furious eagles.
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