A colonial-nesting seabird shows no heart-rate response to drone-based population surveys

• Published in: Scientific Reports
• Main Authors: Geldart, Erica A., Barnas, Andrew F., Semeniuk, Christina A. D., Gilchrist, H. Grant, Harris, Christopher M., Love, Oliver P.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
• Subjects: Article; Common Eider; Somateria mollissima
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9637139/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36335150; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22492-7

Aerial drones are increasingly being used as tools for ecological research and wildlife monitoring in hard-to-access study systems, such as in studies of colonial-nesting birds. Despite their many advantages over traditional survey methods, there remains concerns about possible disturbance effects that standard drone survey protocols may have on bird colonies. There is a particular gap in the study of their influence on physiological measures of stress. We measured heart rates of incubating female common eider ducks (Somateria mollissima) to determine whether our drone-based population survey affected them. To do so, we used heart-rate recorders placed in nests to quantify their heart rate in response to a quadcopter drone flying transects 30 m above the nesting colony. Eider heart rate did not change from baseline (measured in the absence of drone survey flights) by a drone flying at a fixed altitude and varying horizontal distances from the bird. Our findings suggest that carefully planned drone-based surveys of focal species have the potential to be carried out without causing physiological impacts among colonial-nesting eiders.