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