As the use of drones increasingly worries everyone from firefighters and air traffic control to law enforcement, Dutch police are investing in what they call “a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem.”
Rather that using nets or death rays to combat drones (see below), Dutch police have joined forces with Guard From Above, a raptor-training security firm based in the Hague, to keep wayward drones from causing trouble by snatching them out of the sky. They have successfully trained bald eagles and their white-tailed cousins to recognise the drones as prey and snatch them in mid-air. One minute, a four-propeller drone is whirring about in a enclosed space; the next, an eagle swoops in and carries it away.
For those worried about the birds being hurt by the blades of the drones, Geoff LeBaron of the National Audubon Society told The Guardian that they have no trouble avoiding injury. “What I find fascinating is that birds can hit the drone in such a way that they don’t get injured by the rotors,” said LeBaron. “They seem to be whacking the drone right in the centre so they don’t get hit; they have incredible visual acuity and they can probably actually see the rotors.”
Humans, of course, only see rotors as a blur – LeBaron suspects that the eagles can make out the complete movement and thus have no trouble avoiding injury. It doesn’t hurt, either, that attacking a drone the way a bird might attack another bird is usually effective. “Their method of attack is always going to be to hit it in the middle of the back; with drones, they perceive the rotors on the side and so they just go for the rear.”
“These birds are used to meeting resistance from animals they hunt in the wild, and they don’t seem to have much trouble with the drones,” Sjoerd Hoogendoorn of Guard From Above told Reuters. But he said the birds must first be trained to recognise drones as prey. The real setback is replacing drones after they’re destroyed by eagles.
A video showing how the eagles take down the drones has been released on youtube by Guard From Above. Dutch police, who still need to figure out how effective the birds will be in crowded places, will decide by the end of this year whether to put their plan into action.
Despite the reassurances, some remain concerned. National Geographic recently posted an article explaining that little consideration has been taken for the eagles. If illicit drone users see eagles and other birdlife as a threat, it won’t be long before we see plastic rotors being replaces with carbon fibre or alloy with shocking consequences.
Using birds to take down drones is that latest in a series of attempts to tackle unwanted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In Japan, drones using nets have been developed to capture rogue UAV that might threaten disruptions along flight paths, while on the other side of the world, a team of British contractors has developed an expensive “death ray” for drones that can disable them in flight.