He said that his team will next observe how close unmanned aerial vehicles can get to other avian populations. Except for birds of prey, which--as many YouTube videos show--tend to mercilessly attack any drone that flies into their airspace.
Every species is going to do something different. What if the bird attacks? What if it makes contact? What if there's an injury?
Then there are the other uses and a question of ethics:
Let's say you know where Kirtland's Warblers or Whooping Cranes are nesting and you want to document it with a drone...is that harassment? How often is too often for checking out the nest?
Can you use a drone to get footage of snowy owls in cornfields? How close is too close?
If you have a drone and fly it over a field and it finds a Short-eared Owl that you didn't know was there and you only saw it after you uploaded your video...does it count on your list?
Is a regular flight of a drone over a wetland going to affect what birds nest there?
Say a duck hunter knows that the closed pools nearby has ducks and it's dead in the pool where they are hunting. They call their friend to check the ducks with a drone and the ducks get flushed and go to the hunting pond?
You may think these are extreme situations but we don't have great laws in place for drones yet. Oh sure, the FAA has some guidelines: don't fly them over populated areas, don't go higher than 400 feet--unless you're near an airport, then be lower. However, looking on YouTube, people are violating some of those rules already. As the price comes down for drones with cameras more and more people will have these for personal use.
The human race creates technology that can mess with wildlife faster than we can know what to do with it, especially when looking at the glacial pace the federal government can respond to a problem. As has been said many time in the Spiderman series: With great power comes great responsibility. Cool things could be done to be less invasive when getting photos of wildlife or documenting them for surveys, but it's all too easy to harass and cause damage.
The researchers did caution that while the drones usually did not have any visible effects on the birds, this does not necessarily mean the flying robots did not create stress for the birds.
"Birds have really good poker faces — their heart rates could be going through the roof, as well as levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and we wouldn't see it," Grémillet said. "Prior studies found that when penguins are exposed to tourists or helicopter flights, they don't react behaviorally, but their heart rates would go high. We would want to do more work studying whether drones have these kinds of effects, as well."
If they get cut they can just go down to the nearest rehab for stitches.
Golden Eagle mistakes drone camera for rival and attacks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8MeCvEDRbs
Ufo Caught Videos - 2015/01/27
Golden Eagle mistakes drone camera for rival and attacks
Incredible footage shows the moment that a Golden Eagle attacked and took down a drone camera flying across the snowy landscape of Norway.
dead
Today while driving home from work I saw a bald eagle up pretty close. I've only seen a wild bald eagle maybe five or six times in my life, and never as close as this one (perhaps 200 feet away).
I started fumbling for my camera but then quickly realised that since she was heading north and I was going south she'd be long gone by the time I would be able to pull over and get out of the truck to snap a photo.
I had ten at once at the head of the South River (west of Annapolis, south of US 50) on my last Christmas Count. Not terribly unusual to see one in the course of a drive to the mall. Even had one some years back picking on some crow or smaller sized bird I couldn't identify in the failing light in the next-door neighbor's back yard up in a Tulip Tree - which is a real unlikely sorta place.
Also usually get a Golden or two from the Chestertown area Count at which I participate (although I haven't myself seen one in the East for decades).
Always a privilege to see these things - which were being annihilated by DDT when I was a kid - but now, unfortunately, it's the Kestrel which makes my month on the rare occasions that I catch a glimpse. Who'da thunk.
The stuff from Leviticus isn't contradictions within the bible, but stuff that contradicts reality. The rest is contradictions within the bible, except my personal favorite, the plagues of Egypt at the end. (These are mostly just a random sampling. There are LOTS more.)
Leviticus 1:
11:5 And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.
The bible says that coneys* are unclean because they "chew the cud" but do not part the hoof. But hares, rabbits and coneys are not ruminants and they do not "chew the cud."
* Hares, rabbits and coneys are all closely-related rodents. If most Americans saw a coney, they'd call it a rabbit.
No George, hares, rabbits, and coneys are most assuredly NOT all closely-related rodents. None of them are rodents. Hares, rabbits, and PIKAS are lagomorphs and Americans don't see coneys unless they go to Africa or a bit to its northeast. Coneys are hyraxes and hyraxes are related to elephants - not mice. And not even an American would be likely to call one a rabbit. And I notice that nobody in that Davis Show thread has corrected those major blunders.
