Wolves roaming Oregon in search of a meal may soon hear something alarming in the night air: a scene of marital strife from the 2019 film Marriage Story. Or, possibly, the predators might hear sweet riffs from Australian rock band AC/DC.
Those sounds will be broadcast from a drone so that researchers can test what audio works best to drive off wolves threatening ranchers' livelihood — a process called “hazing.”
Two years ago, Dustin Ranglack, a researcher with the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Research Center, was monitoring wolves near ranches in Klamath and Jackson Counties. He discovered that packs would disperse at the sound of human voices played from a drone.
“What we found is that it actually works really quite well, especially if you have a speaker attached. That's kind of the real key,” said Ranglack.
After deploying the noisy drones, he said depredations by wolves dropped from around one every other night to less than one per month. Those findings were published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation this month.
According to that paper, Oregon had at least 178 wolves in 2022. While packs in the northeast of the state were delisted from the Endangered Species Act, wolves in western Oregon remain federally protected which means ranchers there must rely solely on non-lethal methods for deterrence.
Ranglack said his team's commercial drones, which include thermal imaging cameras, are likely too expensive for most ranchers. But in the future, as the technology becomes cheaper, drones could become a useful non-lethal option to keep livestock safe.
“If they had the ability to send up a drone before they go to bed and have it fly their property autonomously… I think that would be really beneficial,” said Ranglack.
