Drone Strike

It's 2017, so we need to have a drone.

Here's how it all started. Pacific Grove is a seaside town, which means we get a lot of seagulls. A lot of seagulls. They're probably charming when you're just visiting for the weekend from some hot, inland location, but they're not much fun to live with. Seagulls are noisy, messy, and very aggressive. We've seen them swoop down on picnics and steal food directly from a 5-year-old's hands.

Like any bird, they like to nest up in high places, which means they leave their... uh... mark all over the sidewalks. This is considered bad for business. It makes the downtown sidewalks look messy and it tends to spoil the pristine seaside look we're going for. So starting last year, the city implemented a "no seagulls downtown" ordinance. Henceforth, it is every downtown business owner's responsibility to make sure that there are no seagulls nesting on their property. And if a nest is found, it's the owner's responsibility to remove it humanely.

To be fair and considerate to the birds, you're only allowed to disturb a nest in the short period between when the birds build it and when it's full of eggs. In other words, you can't disturb a nest with eggs, nor can you molest a nest with baby gulls in it. We're not monsters.

We have to comply with the new ordinance because we're located downtown. So, we somehow have to determine (a) whether there's a seagull nest up on our roof, and (b) how to remove it if there is.

How, exactly, do we accomplish that? It's a three-story house and I don't have a ladder that big. I mean, how would you know if there's a seagull nest on your roof?

Last year, the city rented a falconer. She walked around town every few days with a falcon or a hawk on her arm, on the theory that flying raptors in the neighborhood would discourage gulls from nesting there. She didn't even have to let the birds off of their tethers. Evidently, just the sight or sound of a hawk or falcon will scare the gulls away. It seemed to work, too. We saw lots of the hawks and falcons, but not so many gulls. Mission accomplished.

But that was last year. This year, we're all on our own. Sure, we could hire the falconer again, but she's expensive, and why would I want to bear that cost all by myself? On the other hand, it would be kind of cool to have a resident falconer hanging out in our front yard. What a conversation starter.

You know what else would be cool? To fly a camera drone over the house and scare off the seagulls ourselves. So that's what we did. For roughly the same price as hiring a falconer or (more traditionally) a roofer to climb up on our roof, we got a radio-controlled quadcopter with a high-resolution camera. It's awesome, and it really works. To a seagull, drones are scary, noisy, hovering predators. So the drone serves two purposes: it takes pictures of the roof looking for nests, while simultaneously scaring away any seagulls that are there. Perfect. Plus, it's just a lot of fun to fly. I recommend it.

Here's a short 90-second clip of some of the aerial footage. (You can also find it on YouTube here.) The video may look a bit grainy here because it's compressed for the blog, but the original raw footage is fantastic. The drone shoots 4K high-resolution video; it's the nicest camera I've ever had, or been allowed to touch. It's better than TV-quality, so it's ample for seagull-hunting. If you look really closely you can see me waving at around the 30-second mark.

The thing also has a range of over half a mile, so it's more than capable of flying entirely out of sight. For now, I'm playing it safe and keeping it near the house. No point in scaring off the neighbors' seagulls. They can get their own drone.