Cloudy With A Chance Of Drumsticks: Eagles Are Being Trained To Destroy Drones

A Dutch firm by the name of Guard From Above has done what we all secretly wished for, but weren’t able to vocalize: trained an entire coop full of bald eagles to take down drones mid-flight. Their efforts were so successful that the Dutch police have contracted the firm’s birds of prey to start patrolling the Netherland skies, according to The New York Times, and the Metropolitan Police Service in London is considering following suit.

Of course, the tradeoff for having a fancy version of a shotgun shell with an average wingspan of 8 feet is the tendency of propellers to chop things off, and although Guard From Above addressed the issue within The New York Times — saying work was underway to come up with some sort of sheath — as Popular Science so aptly put it, fast-spinning blades causes gashes.

National Geographic raises another point about using America’s national bird as drone destroyers: Bald eagles aren’t air-to-air predators.

“They eat fish and carrion. Bald eagles are not falconry birds,” President of the Raptor Conservancy of Virginia Kent Knowles said to National Geographic. “It’s dangerous because drones are not like anything bald eagles or other birds of prey find in nature. I don’t think they have any understanding of what drones are.”

The drones the eagles are being trained to take down are off-the-shelf drones, according to The New York Times, and the takedown process can be seen in the videos embedded below.

Head over to the The New York Times to watch their own video of a separate Guard From Above demonstration.