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In The Spectator, Mary Wakefield explains her dislike of hobby drones, and the dangers they pose to wildlife. She writes:
There are many annoying noises in the countryside, but nothing, for me, beats a drone. Lawnmowers, chainsaws, leaf blowers — perhaps if you hate your neighbor they’re hard to bear, but at least they serve a purpose. When the job ends, so does the noise. A drone idles in the sky indefinitely and there’s no telling what it’s up to. It destroys not just the silence but the feel of solitude. And what’s the point? Who looks back at all those thousands of hours of swooping footage? All those bird’s-eye views of the coast, wasting space in server farms.
Conor Friedersdorf once wrote a piece for the Atlantic about the very particular horrors of drone warfare in Pakistan. “Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of schools. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead twenty-four hours a day.” It’s absurd to compare toy drones to their killer cousins, and yet… they have something in common. Just the sight of them is stressful, oppressive.
It’s often hard to spot a drone’s operators, but the other day by the sea they were easy to identify. A man and a woman standing on the beach nearby, heads together examining the drone’s footage on a phone — watching me, perhaps, my eyes bugged out with rage, lips a hypothermic blue.
I could, I suppose, have risen dripping from the sea and accosted them. I could have told them that there were oystercatchers trying to nest on the rocks nearby, and explained how stressful drones are for wildlife. I could have asked them to watch the famous video of a mother bear and her cubs in Canada, scared literally to death by a drone. But what would have been the point?
Drone hobbyists are often jolly types, fathers and sons on an afternoon out. It never occurs to them how much damage they do, and anyhow, they’re innocent, quite within their rights. Though the administrators that govern the British countryside usually love a ban, for some reason they give drones a pass. Dogs must be kept on leashes, but drones roam free. Snowdonia, Dartmoor, the Lake District, Northumberland National Park — all legal droning zones. I can’t for the life of me think why. We’re told endlessly to get out and enjoy nature for our mental and physical health. So why do the authorities permit an activity that so quickly and casually ruins the countryside for everyone?
Read more here.
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