Researchers from the USDA have been testing drones as a way to protect livestock from wolf attacks, the Capital Press reported. Drones can have a speaker, camera or spotlight attached to them, allowing for different ways to distract a wolf. We learn more about how researchers are using the technology as a non-lethal way to manage wolves and livestock. Paul Wolf, the SW District Supervisor for USDA Wildlife Services, and Dustin Ranglack with the National Wildlife Research Center join us.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Over the years we have heard about many non-lethal measures to deter wolves from eating livestock, from bright lights and loud noises to those undulating tube men that are more common at used car lots. Now, researchers in Southwest Oregon are trying a new tactic. They are harassing attacking wolves from the air using drones. Paul Wolf has been leading this effort. He is a district supervisor for USDA Wildlife Services. Dustin Ranglack is the Utah Field Station leader with the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center. He has been studying this effort. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Paul Wolf: Thank you, Dave. I appreciate it. This is pretty exciting for us and I appreciate your interest. We’re excited too, to see what the next non-lethal tool will be. And our efforts really started back in 2018 where a lot of the ranching community through the Jackson County Wolf Advisory Committee, as well as in Klamath [County] was asking how do we deal with the rogue pack? So we immediately started working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) on reducing attractants. And that has progressively got us to where we are today.
Miller: If I could just interrupt. So what was happening? I mean, back in 2020, 2021, 2022, like how much predation were you seeing there?
Wolf: Quite a bit. So back in 2020, between July 17th and around September 11th, there were 10 confirmed depredations. Our team was out there with ODFW and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We were putting in what we kind of deemed as night watch. In essence, it was kind of like babysitting the cattle. We were out there using high tech thermal imaging to detect the wolves coming in that would be threatening the cattle and then chase them off.
Miller: And how were you chasing them off?
Wolf: With vehicles, by foot, with loud noises, having direct contact with them, chasing them out.
Miller: So, how many people were involved in those operations night after night?
Wolf: Earlier on, it was usually one or two wildlife services folks. Usually, a staff or two from ODFW and a staff or two from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that was also rotating through. And so we weren’t always out there at the same time. But one thing was definitely certain is that when we weren’t there, that’s when the wolves took advantage. There would be some type of conflicts. So we were taking that and fortunately, the wolves were behaving themselves in 2021 and my staff were trying to just do outreach and do carcass removal and just some of the basic things that we’re promoting with ODFW.
But this last year, between July 12th through August 1st, there were 11 confirmed depredations and then Wildlife Services asked us to come in from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and ODFW to put some pressure on them and see if we could stop it. We brought in 17 people from Wildlife Services in different states to help my current staff in Oregon here. It was a concerted effort. It was huge.
It was amazing what we were able to accomplish. But in that process, an idea came up, hey, let’s push the drones and see if that would give us an aerial advantage. And as you might suspect when you’re using thermal from above versus where we’re on the ground, having that aerial asset. My staff right now is like they wouldn’t be able to work without it or they feel like they can’t just because they got introduced to the technology. So it worked great for detection and being able to see the threat coming from the tree line and intercept that.
But also what we had learned is that the first drones that we were using, an Autel Evo II Dual, has an interchangeable light and a speaker on it. And the pilot that came in to help us with this effort, flew the drone in and lo and behold, the wolf saw it coming and started to play bow and wanted to catch the drone.
Miller: Play bow? Wait. What does that mean?
Wolf: It means like when you play with your dog and he puts his front feet down and he wants to play. Well the wolf wanted to play.
Miller: [They] thought this was just a fun toy to play with?
Wolf: That’s how it appeared. And right away that pilot calls me and says, “Well, I don’t know if this is gonna work.” But he flew that drone back and hooked up the speaker, flew the drone immediately back to that animal and it was ready and waiting the minute he spoke across the loudspeaker, “Uh, hey wolf, get out of here.” That animal turned and ran.
Miller: That’s literally what he said?
Wolf: That is literally what he said.
Miller: I mean, he could have said “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” right?
Wolf: Right. Yeah, exactly. And that was the thing that I think that we’re very interested in [during the] 51 days or 85 days we had deployment. We had people rotating through and we had 51 interactions. When those pilots were coming in, every pilot that pursued that animal or animals, they would say something different. So I think that there may be something to just having a new voice, a reflection of the voice, what they’re saying. I think the wolves are responding to that negatively and running into the trees. We played with using music, gunshots that were downloaded from the internet and recorded onto the device. The animals are responding to that, but we were seeing a strong correlation between the human voice in our activities.
Miller: That was the scariest thing? If I could bring Dustin Ranglack into this conversation. As I noted, Utah Field Station Leader with the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center. Can you give us more context on the use of drones in other human wildlife conflicts across the country? I mean, what else have they been used for?
Dustin Ranglack: Drones have been used for a little while, but this is still a fairly new technology. Some of the other uses that we’re seeing right now are down in areas where they have problems with feral hogs and feral swine. They’re often used to get an aerial image of the type of damage that hogs can be providing. And I know that they’ve also been used for trying to haze birds away from crop fields. But as far as I know, this is really kind of the first use of drones for hazing a large bodied mammal, to really try to use this as a tool to resolve conflicts with livestock like what we’re seeing here.
Miller: So how quickly, in general, do wolves adapt to human interventions?
Ranglack: Well, that’s always the big problem. I mean, we have a lot of different tools but wolves are pretty smart. One of the main tools that are often used and that people talk about a lot is called flad or even turbo fladry. That’s basically where you have a wire and in the case of turbo fladry, it’s an electrified fence wire that has these red flags dangling off it about every 18 inches. And you put that around your pasture or wherever you’re working and the wolves are very hesitant to cross that. They’ll come right up to it and they do not want to cross those past red flags. They’re very afraid of this new object. They don’t understand what it is. Typically when we’re putting out fladry, we say [that] 60 to 90 days after that, the wolves kind of get used to it and they’re gonna cross. As soon as the wolves realize that it’s not a threat to them, that it’s not scary, that they can cross and nothing bad’s gonna happen, they’re not afraid of it and that tool isn’t effective anymore. So that’s one of our big questions that we have with this drone work.
How long might it take for wolves to habituate to this new tool that we’re trying to use?
Miller: And it seems that one of the ways you’re hoping you can keep some element of newness is literally that there might be different voices coming out of the drone speaker depending on who’s piloting it that evening, right?
Wolf: That’s correct. Or even what we say out of the drone is another thing that we’re looking at.
Miller: Like different languages?
Wolf: Well, different languages or just what you say is different from the next person, what he says to the wolf. And so there’s that variability there that I think may be enough to just keep them on edge. But I don’t know. We just were really excited about what we saw and wanted to say this might be something new for us that appears to be promising at this time.
Miller: You mentioned before [that] pre-drones, [there] was a sizable group that was necessary. You had the infrared, the thermal cameras and you’d see some activity and then you’d send folks out in a vehicle. What’s the team like for the drone attacks?
Wolf: So to give you a kind of perspective of what our normal night looks like, right before sundown the team basically would be two or three vehicles and then your drone pilot. And what they would do is try to get the cattle off of the fence line or the tree line. So they had a couple 100 yards to be able to view any heat signature coming from the tree line to interact with the cattle. Ground teams would be doing surveillance on that if they saw something. They would com- municate to the pilot to investigate something.
There was times where the pilot was out just flying and said, “Hey guys, there’s something over here,” and then he would drop in, take a look at it, and discover that it was a coyote or it was a wolf that was actively pursuing. And so that’s typically how that would work. If we were able to get down on it, we have actually documented interactions where the drone dropped down on the wolves in an active attack where they were actually biting on the cattle and we would use the drone to drop in, yell at them, and scare them off and actually save cattle that way.
Miller: But how is this sustainable? I mean, having all of this team active night after night to prevent predation I mean, how do you think about cost?
Wolf: That you’re spot on. No, it’s not. What we’re trying to do is truly try to maximize our efforts out there right now. It is like we want to throw everything with the kitchen sink at it, and then look at that so I can tell you right now, we probably don’t need 17 people. My staff right now, including myself, are now certified drone pilots. So I’m kind of my team’s backup if they should need me. So that’s gonna reduce the number of personnel.
Ultimately, if we want to look into a crystal ball and Dustin can chime in on this, but ultimately, what we kind of envision is having a drone be able to recognize a wolf threat and then the rancher be notified, “Hey, there’s a wolf out in the pasture,” or, “there’s a threat out there,” that he could be able to be texted or communicated somehow to be able to respond to that.
Miller: So Dustin in the scenario that Paul just outlined, is there some kind of automation here or AI where there’s just a drone at night and it recognizes the heat signature of a wolf and then it alerts the rancher?
Ranglack: I think that that’s the ultimate goal. I mean, we’re a ways away from that. That’s not gonna be available for a while. So don’t go rushing out and thinking that you’re gonna be able to do that next week. But that would be the goal, to create a library of images of, of thermal images of what a wolf looks like from the air. What a grizzly bear looks like from the air, what a cow looks like from the air, what a sheep looks like from the air, all these different things. Build that library so that with machine learning and AI, we can essentially have these drones go out.
What I ultimately envisioned in the long term future [is that] you have this drone go out autonomously and fly on a pre-programmed flight path around your herd or around the pasture, around that area that you’re trying to protect. And it’s gonna be able to go out and recognize if, if everything is looking normal or if something is wrong, like whether there is a wolf out there [or] a coyote out there? Is there something that you need to worry about? And then send some sort of alert, whether that is to the producer themselves [or] it’s to the wildlife services personnel on the ground that something is wrong. And then they can go out and respond to it.
I think that that is probably a much more viable future for this technology than having pilots actively out there every night surveilling, and then trying to haze wolves away. But those are some of the questions that we’re trying to ask and some of the data that we’re trying to build up. In order for that machine learning to work, we need to have a library put together of what these, of these different thermal signatures of all these different animals. So we’re a ways away from that still.
Miller: Dustin, do you know where the wolves that have been hazed away whether using more traditional efforts or these new ones where they go and what they do after? I guess I’m wondering if they just go eat, you know, the neighbor’s sheep or the neighbor’s cows or if they go somewhere else?
Ranglack: Yeah, again, that’s a really great question. Those are some things that have been looked at with some of the previous techniques, but that’s something that we’re gonna be evaluating with this for sure. You know, you don’t want it to be just like a leaf blower where you’re blowing the leaves out of your yard, but they just end up in your neighbors. Right? Don’t want to move this wolf conflict around so that they’re leaving one producer alone but then going to the neighbors. But we want to try to use this to keep the wolves in areas where they’re gonna be able to take advantage of native prey, whether that’s elk or deer or whatever else.
Miller: In the bigger picture, we heard recently about a study out of the University of Washington that found that climate change is a kind of global amplifier of human wildlife conflict in addition to just human encroachment on long time animal habitats. What does the future look like to you in terms of novel ways to respond to these kinds of conflicts?
Ranglack: Well, that’s my job and that’s why I feel like I have the best job security there is. Because everywhere throughout the west, we have expanding predator populations, whether that’s wolves or grizzly bears or whatever else. All these populations are growing and expanding. At the same time, we have expanding human populations into all of these same areas. We all want to have the house in the mountains, away from all the people and the hustle and bustle. So that is just leading to more and more opportunities for conflict.
At the same time, the backdrop of all that, we’ve seen a change in human values and perspectives less from a more traditional kind of consumer approach where nature is there for man to use, to more of a mutual approach, a mutual viewpoint where all of these animals, wolves, grizzly bears, everything else, have just as much of a right to exist as people do. Well, all of that changes the tactics of how we do things.
It’s no longer necessarily acceptable to go out and remove problem animals using a bullet. But we have to try to search out new non-lethal tools like this. So that’s our role here at the Utah Field Station of the National Wildlife Research Center. We are focused specifically on predators and how we resolve these sorts of conflicts with predators. And we’re always trying to use new technology, new ideas, trying to develop new techniques and tools that can be used in the field to reduce this sort of conflict. Sort of in a proactive conflict prevention mode as opposed to reactive. Ok. What do we do now that we’re having depredations?
Miller: Dustin and Paul, thanks very much. Dustin Ranglack is the Utah Field Station leader with the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center. Paul Wolf is the Southwest district supervisor for USDA Wildlife Services. They joined us to talk about the use of aerial drones to scare away wolves that are trying to eat cattle.
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