Kakapo x New Zealand Department of Conservation

ENDANGERED SPECIES

Wildlife Drones was invited by the New Zealand Department of Conservation to trial their innovative radio-tracking technology on Whenua Hou Island – one of the last strongholds for the critically endangered Kakapo.

On the Island, we were able to demonstrate how easily our drone technology could track the birds. Compared with spending hours radio-tracking on foot across rugged and remote areas, we were able to track 19% (40 birds) of the global kakapo population all at once. We even aided in locating birds on parts of the Island that were physically inaccessible to the rangers.

From just a couple of rotations of the drone, we can get good locations on multiple birds. It’s faster than the triangulation that we do by hand and provides high-quality data we can include in our database

Dr Andrew Digby
Science Advisor, New Zealand Department of Conservation