For millennia humans have tried to scare wolves away from their livestock. Most of them didn’t have drones.
But a team of biologists working near the California-Oregon border do, and they’re using them to blast AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, movie clips and live human voices at the apex predators to shoo them away from cattle in an ongoing experiment.
“I am not putting up with this anymore!” Scarlett Johansson yells in one clip, from the 2019 film Marriage Story that’s being used in the experiment.
Gray wolves were hunted nearly to extinction throughout the US West by the first half of the 20th century.
Since their reintroduction in Idaho and at Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, they’ve proliferated to the point that a population in the Northern Rockies has been removed from the endangered species list.
There are now hundreds of wolves in Washington and Oregon, dozens more in northern California, and thousands roaming near the Great Lakes.
The recovering population has brought increasing conflict with ranchers – and increasingly creative efforts by the latter to protect livestock.
They’ve turned to electrified fencing, wolf alarms, guard dogs, horseback patrols, trapping and relocating, and now drones. In some areas where nonlethal efforts have failed, officials routinely approve killing wolves, including last week in Washington state.
Scientists with the United States Department of Agriculture developed the techniques for hazing wolves by drone while monitoring them using thermal imaging cameras at night, when the predators are most active.
A preliminary study released in 2022 demonstrated that adding human voices through a loudspeaker rigged onto a drone can freak them out.
The preloaded clips include recordings of music, gunshots, fireworks and voices.
A drone pilot starts by playing three clips chosen at random, such as the Marriage Story scene or Thunderstruck, with its screams and hair-raising electric guitar licks.
If those don’t work, the operator can improvise by yelling through a microphone or playing a different clip that’s not among the randomised presets.
Environmental advocates are optimistic about drones because they allow for scaring wolves in different ways, in different places.
“Wolves are frightened of novel things,” said Amaroq Weiss, a wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Ranchers in Northern California who have hosted drone patrols agree that they have reduced livestock deaths so far.
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