16 Oct 2018
French
development based on avian perception can both save rare birds and minimize
fatal accidents.
Researchers
from the CNRS and Université
de Rennes, all in France, in collaboration with Airbus, have designed a visual pattern that
achieves long-term avoidance of high-risk areas by birds of prey (“raptors”) –
such as at airports and around wind turbines.
The
scientists’ work opens the way for further investigation into the visual
cognition of such birds, and it has applications for conservation, because
raptors are among the most common victims of collisions with airplanes and
turbine blades. The work is published in PLOS
ONE.
Despite
their exceptional visual acuity, raptors do not perceive certain hazardous
obstacles such as glazed surfaces, or they are too late in detecting some
moving objects, like airplanes.
In France
alone, over 800 collisions between birds and airplanes are reported each year,
with 15% of these classified as serious incidents. As available deterrent
systems are hardly effective with raptors (smart birds typically learn to
ignore "predator dummies" in a matter of days), scientists from
the Éthologie
Animale et Humaine (Ethos) research laboratory decided to develop a
new means of repelling these birds from specific areas.
But it is
not just the birds that suffer from these collisions: as the PLOS ONE article
reports, based on many long-term sets of accident data from across the world,
bird collisions are also the cause of many airplane crashes and human
fatalities:
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