Drone hones in on penguins
Rather than crawling around in the bush of a subantarctic island for hours searching for yelloweyed penguin nests, Massey University PHD student Chris Muller can now do it all by drone.
When looking at the population of yellow-eyed penguins on the subantarctic Auckland Islands, 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, Muller came up with the project Drone Ranger, which uses drone technology to monitor wildlife.
Muller won the Innovate 2018 business competition for the project, where he teamed up with engineers from the University of Canterbury, a radio expert, a drone expert and a software expert, to create a new way of radio-tracking the birds.
The isolation, terrain and thick bush on the Auckland Islands meant it took about six hours to find a nest, so Muller thought there had to be a quicker way. Now with his drone technology, it takes 11 minutes.
Muller said reports on the penguins were mainly based on birds on the mainland, so the remaining population on subantarctic islands needed to be studied further, because no-one had studied the population since 1989.
‘‘The Department of Conservation needed a subantarctic census done, and I jumped at the chance to get back to this unique part of the world.’’
Muller has spent the past three summers studying the birds on the islands and he said a camera or thermal imagery wouldn’t work because of the thick vegetation.
Even once they knew where the nests were it could take a week to get around them all. Now they can get around them in a morning.
It could take an hour to crawl along 100 metres of penguin tracks, so the drone work was invaluable.
‘‘The first season I did it the oldfashioned way and it took an average of six hours to find each nest crawling around looking for them.’’
Now they catch the birds on the beach and attach a radio transmitter, which is included in the 11 minutes, then allow the birds to return to the nest.
He is collating the results, but wanted to see what other wildlife he could study with the technology.
Muller said there were 2000 breeding pairs of the birds and 60 of them lived on subantarctic islands. It was too early to tell the results, but he said the bird numbers were looking OK.
Muller, who did his masters in marine biology at the University of Auckland, also spent three seasons working on Campbell Island researching sea lions and did a season at Scott Base in Antarctica.
Because the islands are a world heritage area, he had to get special permission from DOC to operate a drone.
Muller was chosen from 91 entries and he won a cash prize from the Manawatu Investment Group, two years’ entry into CQ – Collective Intelligence, entry into the incubation programme and office space at The Factory.