#drone fail

[mouthtapedguy]

when goats unionize against surveillance! 🐐🚫📹

[prop4drones]

When you spend all your money on the camera...

Video by Joel Honeywell.

[prop4drones]

Well I’ve never...

[prop4drones]

When your drone flying skills are just TOO fire...

[prop4drones]

Irresponsible droning

This footage of a mother bear and cub scaling a steep slope in Russia has gone viral. While the cub's climb has been portrayed as an inspirational message about the power of perseverance, biologists and drone operators themselves have reacted to the video, dismayed by the improper use of a drone.

"It doesn’t matter how far away it was, because I can tell from the bears’ behavior that it was too close,” said Clayton Lamb of the University of Alberta, who studies grizzly bears in the Canadian Rockies and uses drones to map the area where they live.

"With a cub that small and vulnerable, it’s very unlikely that a mother bear would opt to traverse such a steep and slippery slope. There’s no reason a female would normally accept that risk, unless they were forced into it." At one point, “the mother swats at the cub, which I interpreted as trying to move the cub away from the trajectory of the drone as it’s about to approach. That’s what sends the cub way down the slope, and it almost goes into this cliffy area and the cub just scrambles out.”

“There’s a lot of positive ways to use drones to protect wildlife,” Lamb said, “but I don’t think this is one of them.”

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*The cub eventually made it to the top and reunited with its mother*

[prop4drones]

I would not be surprised if this drone's pilot faces charges and/or a civil lawsuit.

[prop4drones]

Who knew you had to look out for backflipping trucks while drone flying?

[prop4drones]

Photo of Illegal Drone in National Park Shows the Sheer Scale of Lava Spout

Photographer and filmmaker Andrew Studer recently photographed something stupid and illegal: someone flying a drone right next to a lava spout in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Fortunately for us, the final shot is just… incredible.

We don’t want the sharing of this photo to be interpreted, in any way, as encouragement to do something stupid and likely illegal (we’re kind of against that). So we are sharing this amazing shot with two very bold disclaimers from Andrew:

Flying drones in national parks (with only a few exceptions) is illegal.

I only posted the photo to highlight the scale of the volcano not start a drone debate.

In the original Facebook post in which Andrew first shared the photo, he said, “As frustrating as it was that they were flying, I wanted to share this photo with the drone in it as I feel like it helps give a little bit of scale to just how massive the spout and explosions are.”

That much, he captured in exquisite detail… here’s a closer crop:

To see more of Studer’s gorgeous photography, videography, and timelapse work—all of it captured 100% legally, we might add—head over to his website or give him a follow on Facebook and Instagram.