The Bangladeshi government’s forest department recently added surveillance drones to their arsenal of conservation tools. Wildlife inspectors started using this technology to prepare a dragnet around a poaching hotspot with an aerial view. In mid-November, Abdullah As Sadeque, a wildlife inspector of the forest department’s Wildlife Crime Control Unit (WCCU) who is assigned to catch bird poachers, used a drone camera to a bird sanctuary in Gopalganj district in southern Bangladesh to sharpen his drone-operating skills. One afternoon, he flew the drone over a beel — an expansive swamp comprising many shallow depressions — at the Kotalipara sub-district of Gopalganj and noticed many of bird traps in remote waterbodies. Thin nylon threads making hundreds of looped knots were strung up in rows across several parts of the beel. Meanwhile, solar-powered loudspeakers played artificial bird calls to deceive migratory birds flying overhead. The arrangement was to trick them into landing in the waterbody. When the birds approach the nooses, it’s the end for them. Sadeque said he saw their necks get caught in the loops, where they became trapped. Sadeque recalled the day. The bed of the waterbody was uneven and the only mode of transportation could be a small-capacity country boat. “If we had tried to patrol the vast waterbody, it would have taken an entire day. We completed the task using a drone and traced the traps in about 15 minutes,” Sadeque told Mongabay. During the operation, illegal bird traps were seized, several birds were rescued, and two poachers…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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