WATCH: Smoke Pours From Alligator's Mouth After It Pulls Down Flying Drone

Anyone who has seen a drone flying near them knows two things: 1. It can easily be mistaken for a bird, insect or other animal, and 2. It can be really annoying. It seems certain animals feel the same way because a video came out this week showing an alligator in Florida snatching a drone flying above it because it either mistook it for prey or was just really bothered by it. Either way, the scene made for some dramatic video, but the real drama began after the gator grabbed the drone from midair - while the destroyed device was in the reptile's mouth, it started pillowing out white smoke.

To read more on this story, click here: WATCH: Smoke Pours From Alligator's Mouth After It Pulls Down Flying Drone

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Dogdrones is a Fleet of Aerial and Rolling Robots, Designed to Clean Dog Poop Off of the Streets

There are drones to deliver pizza, drones which follow people around taking selfies – but someone has just come up with something a little more useful.

Dogdrones is a fleet of aerial and rolling robots, designed to work as a team to clean the streets of dog poop.

The system consists of two units – Watch Dog and Patrol Dog – which are already under test in prototype form.

Watch Dog is a flying drone which spots dog poop by looking for warm spots (in other words, fresh ones).

It then transmits coordinates to Patrol Dog, a rolling ground drone which scoops up and disposes of the poop.

Tinki, the start-up behind the idea, says, “By receiving GPS coordinates PD1 gets the command to immediately dispose of the dog poop.

With a camera and thermal imaging WD1 is scanning its environment. The drone is able to detect dog poop while it still has the body temperature of the dog.”

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is Proposing to use Unmanned Aerial Drones to Help Black-Footed Ferrets

Black-footed ferrets are America’s ferrets, the only ones native to this country — and they’re in trouble. What better way to help save them than one of America’s favorite contraptions, the drone?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to use unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly known as drones, to rain peanut-butter pellets down on northeast Montana. The tasty ammunition is laced with a vaccine against the plague. The targets are prairie dogs that are commonly afflicted with the disease.

Getting those rodents to scarf down the drone-fired bait would keep them healthy, which in turn would help the ferrets, because black-footed ferrets eat prairie dogs. Prairie dogs, in fact, make up 90 percent of the diet of the carnivorous ferrets, which also live inside the prairie dogs’ old burrows. Black-footed ferrets are, in other words, entirely dependent on prairie dogs.

And keeping black-footed ferrets alive is a key mission for Fish and Wildlife, whose literature charmingly refers to the animals as “BFFs.” They’re cute and oblong, with the face of a tiny badger, and they’re among the most endangered species in the world. As Americans pushed west, prairie dog eradication programs, agriculture and development removed much of the ferrets’ prey and habitat, and by 1987 just 18 of the little masked creatures remained.

They’ve since been captured, bred in captivity and reintroduced to more than two dozen spots in eight Western states and Canada and Mexico. But there still aren’t many of them, and the flea-borne plague is a big threat. For years, Fish and Wildlife workers have squirted flea-killing powder, by hand, down into prairie dog burrows across the plains. But that’s labor-intensive and inefficient, and there are signs the fleas might be developing a resistance, said Fish and Wildlife biologist Randy Matchett. Vaccinating the ferrets from the plague is also tough, because they live underground and are nocturnal.

Enter the peanut butter pellets — and the drones. Matchett has been hard at work developing the pellets, which encase a vaccine that has worked in lab trials and in small patches of the wild to protect prairie dogs from the plague. Now the government wants to expand the trials to bigger, 1,000-acre areas. The idea is to head out in the early mornings, while ferrets are sleeping but prairie dogs are active, and drop a pellet every 30 feet. In tests, that rate has enticed 70 to 95 percent of prairie dogs to eat the bait (which Matchett said he knows because it tinted their whiskers pink).

The pellets, by the way, are not M&Ms, as has been reported elsewhere, Matchett said. “We do not have an official candy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” said an agency spokesman, Ryan Moehring. They are “more like a mini-marshmallow,” Matchett said.

But how to efficiently dispense them? Matchett has proposed testing two ideas at a national wildlife refuge in northeastern Montana: Strap a GPS-sensing dispenser to a human-driven ATV that shoots a pellet left, right and down every 30 feet. Or strap the same sort of dispenser to a fixed-wing drone, which could be cheaper and speedier, treating two acres a minute, Matchett said.

“You see how the math and that velocity really get attractive,” he said.

Matchett said he is working with a contractor to design the pellet-shooting drone, which he hopes will get a trial run later this summer. “I know nothing about drones, but he does,” Matchett said. “And I’ve explained the requirements that we need, and he says, ‘I can do that.'”

Flea-killing spraying and ATVs will probably also remain in use, Moehring said. “This is conceptual and limited in scope,” he said. “There is not an army of drones heading to the West.”

Though the use of a drone would be novel, this is hardly the first time airdrops have been used for conservation.

Among the most delightful examples actually involved airdropping the animals themselves. In the 1950s, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game rounded up beavers that were wreaking havoc on private property, packed them by twos into wooden boxes, attached them to parachutes and dropped them into remote areas where the toothy rodents’ dam-building skills were needed.

As in the case of the ferrets, the paratrooper force grew out of a need for efficiency: Previously, the beavers had been trapped, packed onto horses, driven by truck to a forest, then packed onto horses again and “subjected to more handling, heat and jolting,” according to a 1950 article by the department’s Elmo W. Heter, who devised the parachute plan. Here’s a video of it:


In 2013, U.S. helicopters dropped 2,000 dead mice strapped to makeshift cardboard and tissue parachutes onto the forests of Guam. Their mission: Kill invasive brown tree snakes. The mice had been studded with acetaminophen, the painkiller in Tylenol, which is lethal to the snakes. The parachutes tangled mice in the trees, where they made perfect tree snake snacks.

In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of vaccine-stuffed chicken heads were airdropped onto the Swiss countryside to help rid foxes of rabies. These days, Texas every year launches what it calls an “aerial assault on rabies,” by sending out planes to drop millions of little plastic packets of fishmeal-coated anti-rabies bait. The targets used to be coyotes and foxes; now they’re also aimed at skunks. This method is used in several Eastern states as well, where the Department of Agriculture has long dropped cubes of anti-rabies laced dog food to prevent raccoon rabies.

And then there’s this bizarre, not-definitely-true example: In the 1950s, the World Health Organization just might have parachuted live cats into Borneo, where it was hoped they’d kill the rats that were spreading plague and typhus among people. The details are sketchy — it might have been just a few cats, or might have been 14,000, and they might have floated down in baskets, according to Patrick T. O’Shaughnessy, an Iowa professor who wrote about the operation for the American Journal of Public Health in 2008. He wrote, however, that the “basic components of the cat story seem to be true,” and “although seemingly bizarre in nature, this method of delivery was not uncommon.”

Back in Montana, Matchett says airplanes aren’t quite right for the ferret mission, because the delivery must be precise, and therefore low-flying.

“We’re saving hoverboards for last,” he said of his vaccine-distribution plan.

That, unlike the drone idea, was a joke.

A black-footed ferret at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center in Wellington, Colo. (AP Photo/ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Kimberly Fraser)

Black-footed ferret babies born at the Conservation and Research Center, part of Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. ( Photo by Jessie Cohen, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

A black-footed ferret prepares to leave its carrier during a release of 30 ferrets by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Commerce City, Colo.  (David Zalubowski/AP)

Department of Agriculture wildlife specialist Tony Salas holds a brown tree snake outside his office on Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. The U.S. government is dropping toxic mice from helicopters to battle the snakes, an invasive species that has decimated Guam’s native bird population. (Eric Talmadge/AP)

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Chimpanzee Annoyed by a Drone Zipping by Her, Used a Tree Branch to Knock it to the Ground

A zoo in the Netherlands posted a YouTube video that showed how a chimpanzee -- annoyed at the drone zipping by her -- used a tree branch to knock it to the ground.

Once the intelligent apes discovered the spying plane ... they immediately armed themselves with long sticks..

In the video, a female chimp sitting on a tree limb lunges forward as the drone files by. Her first swing, a powerful downward stroke, misses. But she nails the copter with a backstroke.

The drone spins out of control and comes crashing down. Then an ape, maybe the same one, runs over and inspects the GoPro camera underneath the drone.

The zoo said the drone was destroyed.

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New Show From Houston, Texas - Operation Houston: Stray Dog City - Using Drones to Track Stray Dogs

Houston, Texas - Are those drones buzzing over a Sunnyside neighborhood, in south Houston?

"It's another amazing tool," said Tom McPhee, executive director of World Animal Awareness Society.

It's a tool to track stray dogs. WA2S is shooting a new TV show, Operation Houston: Stray Dog City. It's an up-close look at Houston's serious stray dog problem and the men and women who try to save the dogs before it's too late.

Momma is a pit bull found by Emal's group. She was found in an abandoned

Tom McPhee

house. She hadn't moved for days and was rotting to death.

"If we hadn't found her, she would have died," said Erika Emal, the founder of Southside Street Dogs.

"It's touch and go," said Emal.

She was rushed to a local emergency vet clinic. It's just one of several stories McPhee wants to highlight in Houston.

"There's obviously issues and problems here," said McPhee.

But to solve those issues you need to first know how big the problem is. It's why McPhee plans to launch his drones across Houston.

"The drone allows us to draw a big circle in the air as we're filming in 4K. It's beautiful footage," said McPhee.

He'll use GPS technology and volunteers on the ground. Together they plan to find and count just how many strays are in the Houston area. Estimates indicate it could be more than a million.

"It's a first step to try and tackle a humongous problem," said Emal.

 

Drones, as low-cost flying machines, make great rescue tools. They can look and go places people can’t--or at least can’t go safely--and with infrared cameras, they can sometimes see beyond what human eyes can. In Houston, the World Animal Awareness Society plans to use them to track stray dogs, combining a drone's utility as a mapping device with its rescue abilities.

However, the project, titled Operation Houston: Stray Dog City,” plans to film not just a stray dog map, but the pilot for a new show. The show started filming on March 20th and will continue filming through the 30th. World Animal Awareness Society is a media nonprofit that's made shows for National Geographic, Animal Planet, and others, though there's no announced broadcast information for Operation Houston yet. As for how the show will be structured, it's billed as a “cross between Pit Bulls & Parolees, Deadliest Catch, and Survivor,” which does not bode terribly well for the pups.

Watch a video of them testing the drone in Detroit below:

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Birds vs. Drones: The Battle for the Skies Continues

I can’t really overstate how much I enjoyed the brief video we published last week of a hawk taking out somebody’s drone. Apart from being a viscerally satisfying and effectively concise clip, it struck me as an almost poetic comment on the state of nature vs. machinery.

After all, we know that some humans are freaked out by drones to the point that they will blow them out of the sky. But have we thought to poll the animal kingdom on this latest human-made intrusion into their lives and habitats?

To read more on this story, click here: Birds vs. Drones: The Battle for the Skies Continues

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