00:03It's oddly quiet in these strawberry fields in South East Queensland.
00:08There's a distinct lack of songbird or, because we're talking about Australian birds, screeching.
00:16And it's all because of this.
00:24Invented in the Netherlands and now owned by a Canadian company, the roe bird is being
00:29trialled in the skies above Australia's horticultural crops.
00:33But what is it?
00:35It's a drone that's modelled off a biomimetic falcon.
00:38What's a biomimetic falcon?
00:39So, instead of a normal, say, fixed-wing drone that will glide and be propelled via a propeller,
00:46it works on flapping its wings, which makes it a pretty unique tool, I guess.
00:53Roe bird was initially commercialised to eliminate bird strikes at airports.
00:57But since being taken over by the Canadians, it has been put to a different use.
01:03Ben Gray is the Australian lead for roe bird.
01:07Its aim is to imitate a predatory bird and create, I guess, predatory presence in an area
01:12and reduce the amount of bird damage in crops.
01:20Bird damage costs Australian horticulture $300 million a year.
01:28Roe bird was brought to this part of south-east Queensland after it caught the attention of Blair Brown,
01:34principal industry lead for food and agribusiness at the City of Moreton Bay Council.
01:39Two years ago, I walked a row just up the road there
01:43and there was significant bird damage.
01:46And as soon as this thing came up, I thought, this is tailor-made for us.
01:52Brought to Australia by Hort Innovations,
01:55they've been testing this model and others since last November
01:58as part of a three-year trial.
02:01Andrew Francie is Hort's General Manager of Industry Services.
02:05Has the data started coming in? And if so, what have you learnt?
02:08So we've learnt that early stages, crop losses are reduced by 89%.
02:13And that's in almonds and now strawberries.
02:17We've got more work to do.
02:18So we're going to be trialling this technology from apples to almonds,
02:22from cherries to strawberries right across the country in different conditions
02:26so we can prove the technology works.
02:28So we can prove the technology works.
02:29So we can prove the technology works.
02:32You
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