Drones for pest control

Aotearoa is a country plagued by pests, but conservationists are hoping advances in drone technology could turn the tables. Producer William Ray looks at how drones are being trialled in controlling everything from microscopic diseases to elusive wallabies, and wilding pine trees.

A ghostly grey image appears on the laptop screen. "You see these deer?" asks Jordan Munn, pointing at a corner off the screen where a pair of animals are highlighted in bright white.

"I have directed a hunter to these deer. He's actually just shot this one, this deer to the right, and it's about to fall over," he says.

The brilliant silhouette of the first deer tumbles to the ground, the second follows a few moments afterwards.

Hunting with heat

Jordan is professional hunter and owns a company called Trap and Trigger based in Upper Hutt. The company has contracts with several regional councils for eliminating everything from deer to wallabies to wilding pines

And Jordan says there's a new technology revolutionising the industry - small commercially available UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or as they are more often called: drones.

"We're becoming more and more reliant on them," Jordan says. "It's amazing how the pest control industry has reshaped in the last decade. Ten years ago, basically non-existent."

When mounted on a drone, the thermal vision of an infrared camera makes warm-blooded deer, wallabies and other mammalian pest species stick out like a sore thumb - even when the animal is mostly obscured by scrub.

A decade ago, Jordan says, even a thermal imaging camera or scope was beyond the budget of most commercial hunters. But costs have come down radically over the past decades, and they are still dropping.

"Within a few years, every contractor will have a thermal handheld camera and a thermal scope and a thermal drone. And if you don't have one of those or all of those, you're lagging behind," Jordan says.

It all seems very science fiction, and Jordan speculates it could be possible to use drone technology to remove the hunter from the equation entirely.

"We haven't yet got guns on them," Jordan says. "But if we could legally use a firearm from a drone safely.... It would work. It would work very well. But there will be a few issues, social issues and legal issues to get to that point."

While weaponised drones aren't likely to arrive in New Zealand any time soon, Otago Regional Council is already experimenting with fully autonomous drones for a different type of pest.

Tree terminators…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details