For millennia humans have tried to scare wolves away from their livestock. Most of them didn’t have drones.
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!“ actor Scarlett Johansson yells in one clip, from the 2019 film “ Marriage Story.“
„With what? I can’t talk to people?“ co-star Adam Driver shouts back.
Gray wolves were hunted nearly to extinction throughout the U.S. 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 meant 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.
Gray wolves killed some 800 domesticated animals across 10 states in 2022, a previous Associated Press review of data from state and federal agencies found.
Scientists with the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service developed the techniques for hazing wolves by drone while monitoring them using thermal imaging cameras at night, when the predators are most active.
