Heck no

I got a buddy starting drone recovery service

Gonna be hard to ever go away from art powers though😀

Last November we had a hunter fall out of his boat for some reason and drowned. I found the boat doing the death circle that night. Our department has one of those large thermal drones. One of our operators came met me that night with it and we flew the banks of the river hoping to find him up on the bank. We were unsuccessful at finding him but man did we figure out that there was a ton of deer that lived in those marshes on the edge of that river. I wish we’d kept track of the number of deer we saw that night. That drone has proved to be a very valuable tool for us but I can’t see where it could be used to survey animals on in a certain area. It would be interesting just to see what lives on our place in Monroe co.

No way. It’s not easy. It’s time consuming.

They could probably just ask the military for a decently high def infra-red Sat image and do it very easily.

I would bet you that the military has a program that can distinguish & count the types/sizes of animals.

I can fly at night and get a count on heat signatures but have no idea what they are. If I fly in the day it needs to be overcast and cool and it take a lot of work to see every deer. You can't see into young pines or bay trees. Here are a couple of daytime videos that show the thermal and zoom. I may do a night flight this weekend just to see the video.

cruising buck

7 PT buck

Here’s more along the lines of what I was thinking in practical terms……Don’t state biologists go out and give private landowners recommendations on how many deer to shoot??......All I’m saying is…..with the thermal technology we have now it would seem like that a drone census would be a helpful tool in making those recommendations……AND in doing so you would have a lot of compiled data to reference.

That would work better than doing a camera survey. I understand that a lot of the bigger drones can fly a grid and log every heat signature it sees with location so you can go back and check them. All you have to do is enter the property boundaries on the drone and wait until it runs the grid.

The state doing and a land owner doing it is two different things . CNC talking about the state doing it .

Most drones can't hover over a deer very long before spooking it either. Maybe long enough if it is just one or 2 deer together but several and they start running it would be hard to tell.

I can hover over a field full of deer until my battery runs down. When I first got my drone, I spooked deer but now I'm smooth on the controls and they could care less.

That’s not been my experience with it. I guess it depends on how good the zoom is on your camera.