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Bold Eagles: Angry Birds Are Ripping $80,000 Drones Out of the Sky (cetusnews.com)
schwit1 found this story in the Wall Street Journal:
Daniel Parfitt thought he'd found the perfect drone for a two-day mapping job in a remote patch of the Australian Outback. The roughly $80,000 machine had a wingspan of 7 feet and resembled a stealth bomber. There was just one problem. His machine raised the hackles of one prominent local resident: a wedge-tailed eagle. Swooping down from above, the eagle used its talons to punch a hole in the carbon fiber and Kevlar fuselage of Mr. Parfitt's drone, which lost control and plummeted to the ground... "It ended up being a pile of splinters"...
These highly territorial raptors, which eat kangaroos, have no interest in yielding their apex-predator status to the increasing number of drones flying around the bush. They've even been known to harass the occasional human in a hang glider... Camouflage techniques, like putting fake eyes on the drones, don't appear to be fully effective, and some pilots have even considered arming drones with pepper spray or noise devices to ward off eagles.
One mining survey superintendent said he's now lost 12 different drones to eagle attacks, costing his employer $210,000. Another drone was actually attacked by nine different eagles, and its pilot estimates eagles are now attacking 20% of all drone flights in rural Australia.
These highly territorial raptors, which eat kangaroos, have no interest in yielding their apex-predator status to the increasing number of drones flying around the bush. They've even been known to harass the occasional human in a hang glider... Camouflage techniques, like putting fake eyes on the drones, don't appear to be fully effective, and some pilots have even considered arming drones with pepper spray or noise devices to ward off eagles.
One mining survey superintendent said he's now lost 12 different drones to eagle attacks, costing his employer $210,000. Another drone was actually attacked by nine different eagles, and its pilot estimates eagles are now attacking 20% of all drone flights in rural Australia.
Do we need further reminders that everything in Australia wants to kill you?
Would pepper spray even work on an eagle? Birds can't taste capsaicin; if anything, it's numbing to them.
It's interesting to see how territorial these birds are. You can find lots of videos on Youtube of them doing things like attacking ultralights and such. I think they're simply going to have to "eagleproof" their drones. Which unfortunately will make them need to be bigger (and more expensive) for a given-sized payload, since a greater chunk of the mass fraction will need to go into structure.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
After the double bird strike put Sully in the east river, a shocking number of birds were killed in response.
The Problem: Drone flies in a manner the that the Eagles think is either prey or competitor. Solution: Find a flying creature they don't attack - Most likely a vulture(everybody thinks vultures are icky, even other birds) - and imitate it's flight
I like to watch them hunt and fight. They're magnificent when they hunt, circling up really high, you can see the feathers off the tip of their wings like fingers feeling the air and when they see their moment they pull their wings in close and fall from the sky like they are pulling every bit of speed they can out of their momentum. I can't really express what it looks like in words adequately and video doesn't really convey the amount of height they strike from or how quickly they descend. You can see how and why jet fighters are designed they way they are.
They also have a sense of humour. I saw a tree full of parrots all squawking and carrying on, they generally leave the tree all at once in one direction as a group. Well, this eagle wasn't having any of that and flew up to this tree and you could almost hear the parrots squawking HOLY SHIT ITS AN EAGLE and scatter, to which the eagle just kind of tilted and kept going, just reminding them.
They get harassed by magpies, crows and other birds, to which they barely respond, just a beat or two of their wings that the other birds cannot match in power.
Once, I saw two of them fighting, way up in the sky. They locked talons and fell, tumbling and rolling over each other closer and closer to the ground. I think the loser is the one breaking from the other first.
Anyway, they are the wedge tailed eagle moments that stick out in my mind that I could share. I saw one up close on the ground once and was a little surprised at just how big it was, the talons, the beak, standing just over a metre high and as I looked into those calm, unconcerned avian eyes I realised it wasn't threatened by me at all, so I'm not surprised they smash drones.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Go shooting protected birds in Australia, and you'll be lucky if the cops get you before the locals do. Most australians consider poaching somewhere between pedophilia and keeping dead hookers in the basement. When I worked at the department of parks, we'd have to think very hard over what info we'd release on animal abuse prosecutions, becuase people would react so angily that vigilantism was a real possibility.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.