Scare crawl drone has proven its worth
Warning sounds from scare crawl drones make barnacle geese fly far away from the fields for up to a week. The drone is ready for sale, including a course for navigating and utilizing it.
Soon we will no longer have intruding barnacle geese occupying our fields. A six-week trial with a “scare crawl drone” has successfully shielded the crops from hungry barnacle geese at Gyldensteen Castle in the northern part of Funen. The small tech-company Naust Robotics, specialised in drones, placed their scare crawl drone on Count Franst Bernstorffs-Gyldensteens’ fields for six weeks. “We learned when the geese would be on the field. Moreover, we observed the following pattern: geese do not fly anywhere when it is very windy or raining. This made our job easier; the milder the weather the drone must operate in, the more simplistic the construction”, says Balázs Megyeri.
In the trial period, the drone proved to be efficient in scaring the barnacle geese off. Not simply from the test field but entirely:“We measured how the geese disperse when the drone flies over the fields to scare them away. In nearly every case, the geese were scared off to nearby fields. However, when we placed a speaker with warning sounds on the drone, the geese would leave the area entirely. When we did it continuously over two days, the geese would leave the field for a week”
Optimistic Count
It fosters optimism regarding the soil at Gyldensten Estate, which has suffered from the geese. When the crops sprout, the geese show up almost immediately and do not leave much, easily consuming 80 percent of the crops. There is no financial compensation for lost crops, and a SEGES report from 2022 documents how the issue with barnacle geese on agricultural land has increased over the past 50 years. In the 1970s the number of overwintering barnacle geese was around a few thousand. Today, however, the number is around 100 to 200 thousand overwintering barnacle geese. In the past, Count Frants Bernstorff-Gyldensteen has without any success attempted to use different methods to scare off the geese – ranging from photostats of wolfs to agricultural machinery. However, the geese became so familiarized with these that they started using them as benchmarks. First, when he encountered Naust Robotics, the results took the scare crawl to new heights.
You can already now sign up on a waiting list on Naust Robotics webpage. Naust robotics is expecting to have developed their finished product in 2023.