British bases in Cyprus get drone to fight bird trappers

Posted on 21 September 2017 - 06:46pm

LARNACA, Cyprus: Police on a British military base in Cyprus on Thursday launched their latest weapon in the fight against illegal bird trappers – a high-tech drone.

A recent study by Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), said Cypriot trappers killed 2.3 million migrating birds in autumn 2016, up from 1.4 million in 2010.

Size for size that makes Cyprus the second-most deadly bird destination in the Mediterranean, after Malta.

And most of the industrial killing takes place within British military-controlled areas, especially the eastern sovereign base of Dhekelia, outside the south coast resort of Larnaca.

After Cyprus gained independence in 1960, Britain retained sovereignty over two base areas covering some 254km² of the island's territory where it runs its own police and courts.

British authorities said the drone would mainly be used by an action team dedicated to combating illegal bird trapping due to the crystal clear imagery it can generate from great heights at a top speed of more than 80km per hour.

Read on  

Fallen Somali Spy Drone Was Disguised as a Huge Bird

Turns out, biomimicry is a pretty good way of spying on people.

Nickolaus Hines

July 19, 2016

Most of the time when people ask if it’s a bird, a plane, or Superman, it’s just a plane. Sometimes, though, it’s a war-zone drone disguising itself with biomimicry.

A drone camouflaged as a large black bird fell out of the sky in Mogadishu, Somalia on May 1. No one is completely sure who it belongs to, or how it fell from the sky, but local news services point to Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency.

The drone’s design is remarkably lifelike — small propellers push the drone forward while the outer half of the wings maintain the illusion by flapping. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but it’s far more likely to sneak overhead unnoticed than a military grade Reaper or Predator drone.

It’s not the first, and surely won’t be the last Mother Nature-inspired spy technology, because nature is the true OG of camouflage. Biodiversity has long served as inspiration for subterfuge, from the Greek’s Trojan Horse to this year’s GoatMan. The Trojan Horse wasn’t meant to be confused with an actual horse of course, and the only creatures GoatMan was trying to convince were goats, but it’s the same general concept: if you want success, emulate nature.

Read on … 

Drone Video Captures Bruising Mid-Air Encounter With Eagle

Aug 11, 2015, 1:46 PM ET

By LOUISE DEWAST via GOOD MORNING AMERICA

An Australian drone user had an unexpected encounter with a feisty raptor when the drone he was piloting was hit by an eagle flying at full speed.

"It survived," Adam Lancaster said about his drone, "but I need $100 in parts to get it going again."

The Wedge-Tailed Eagle also survived the impact, according to Lancaster, who said she "hovered over to make sure we had learned our lesson."

Lancaster is a drone photographer and videographer based in Melbourne, training to become a certified drone operator.

"Eagle was fine -- she was massive, and used talons to 'punch' the drone out of the sky," Lancaster wrote on the video description he posted online.

Lancaster has urged other drone pilots to avoid sharing the airspace with birds of prey.

Continued and video ...

Hawk engages drone in aerial combat and wins [Video]

By Aaron Mamiit, Tech Times | October 11, 9:38 AM

Nature still has an edge over technology as a hawk wins over a drone in aerial combat.

In the captured video, neither the hawk nor the drone suffered any damage, but the hawk did show who was truly king of the skies.

Christoper Schmidt, a software developer and resident of Cambridgeport in Cambridge, Mass. took his quadcopter out to Magazine Beach to take a video of the changing color of the tree foliage.

Schmidt has been flying the device about twice a week since he purchased it half a year ago, creating and uploading several videos on his page in YouTube. He is able to take the videos using a GoPro camera that he installed on the drone's frame.

Whenever Schmidt flies his quadcopter, he says that the drone often encounters a few birds but passes by without any incident.

However, on the day that the video was taken, Schmidt saw that a hawk was in the area where his drone was flying in.

Read on ...

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane—No, It’s a Bird-Counting Drone

A new project uses infrared cameras mounted on UAVs to assess the effectiveness of conservation efforts.

June 03, 2014 By Katharine Gammon

Katharine Gammon has written for Nature, Wired , Discover, and Popular Science. A new mom, she lives in Santa Monica.

In California’s San Francisco Bay Delta watershed, conservationists have been working for decades to coax farmers into adopting wildlife-friendly farming practices to help migratory birds like the magnificent sandhill crane. Their efforts seem to be working, but counting the number of birds migrating through the Bay Delta has been a laborious and painstaking process—until the drones appeared.

The Nature Conservancy is testing out an unmanned aerial vehicle topped with an infrared camera to get a more accurate, quicker count of the birds. Each morning, the birds take to the sky together from shallow water. “It’s an amazing sound and scene—they put out this very primeval call, and then they all get up and fly out to go foraging for the day,” says Rodd Kelsey, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist for the Central Valley & Mountains region. “Drones enable us to [count them] faster, cheaper, and more accurately.”

This spring, the team tested a fixed-wing drone with an infrared camera. The birds show up as dark spots on the water because their feathers retain body heat. Getting an accurate count is as simple as tallying the dark dots, says Kelsey. The drone is battery powered, so it’s quiet enough to hover over the birds without disturbing them.

Continued