Drones, Lasers & Desert Tortoises
What one field biologist is teaching us about the future of conservation.
Nothing moves quickly in the desert, except for the occasional whiptail lizard. The unrelenting sun and heat slows you down and makes you think twice about your every move. Managing your limited energy level becomes a matter of life and death. Every creature and species that survive in the Mojave has evolved around that simple fact. Such is the case with the desert tortoise, and also with Tim Shields.
Tim is a desert junky. He wasn’t born there, but you would never know it. He lives and breathes the place. His first field season studying the desert tortoise was in 1979, a detail that becomes an oft-repeated reference point to many of his stories and statistics. Thirty-five years is nothing in desert time, and Tim knows that, but the last three decades have been exceptional. He’s had a front-row seat to the significant changes and watched helplessly as his beloved tortoises have dwindled in numbers. The challenge has come from many fronts: reduced habitat due to development in California’s Central Valley, respiratory diseases, and the increasing threat of raven predation on juvenile tortoises.
More recently, Tim has moved beyond documenting their decline and is now experimenting with novel, almost radical, ideas on how to protect his favorite species. Tim’s big dream is to create a video game that kids can play online, where they control a rover — an RC car with telerobotic control — and follow the tortoises around, deterring and obstructing ravens whenever they try to attack. His ideas are just barely possible. While technically achievable, the devil of this grand vision is, of course, in the details. Each step — the internet control, the rover, the video game interface — could take entire teams years of work, and Tim didn’t have any funding. But that hasn’t stopped him from trying.
Tim’s enthusiasm is his best asset on this quest. Listening to him describe the beauty of the desert, the resilient wisdom of the tortoise, and the so-crazy-it-just-might-work scheme is enough to make anyone want to lend a hand. And Tim has collected all of the offers that show any promise. He has started to tackle the different technical aspects of the complex chain and, as anticipated, surprises abound.
The drive to the Mojave from San Francisco is foreboding. Inside the gated walls of the city, the drought only exists as a headline. On Highway 5, speeding through California’s Central Valley, the effects are stark. There is a clear line between having just enough water and being completely barren. The drought, though, is just a small component of a much larger environmental reality: total human domination. The extent to which we have completely transformed this landscape is nearly unfathomable, even though you can see it all from the highway on this six-hour drive. It’s the drought-stricken farms, but it’s also the mountainous landfills, the wind farms, the cattle factories, and the sprawling Central Valley suburbs. There is nothing in the desert tortoise genome that could have prepared them for this rapidly evolving habitat.
We follow Tim’s directions to the Desert Tortoise Natural Area, a 3-acre preserve for the species. Off the highway and down a long, dirt road, we come to a motorhome trailer parked behind a fence. This has been Tim’s main stomping ground for the past thirty years. He’s giddy as he shows us around, pointing out the naturalist’s quarters (a motorhome), his favorite camping spot, and the dirt bike tracks just outside the fenced-in area. We stop at the only man-made structure in sight, an awning that doubles as a shade structure and information booth with pertinent tortoise information.
“That’s where I got married,” Tim says and points at the awning.
Like anyone who rarely gets visitors, he has years of stories built up and is unsure which ones to tell, so he opts for all. I enjoy them, but we’re both keenly aware of the rising sun. It doesn’t take thirty years experience to know the early morning cool is about to give way to blistering heat. Our window is small so we resolve to begin walking. Before we start, Tim checks with the naturalist on duty to get a beat on any known locations. She offers up some recent sightings, but we don’t get anything too promising.
Tim decides we’re going to try his old hot spot. He gives me a brief explanation about what to look for, pointing out the burrows that the tortoises dig for shade and protection. They’re the most likely place we’ll find a tortoise. We spread out, about thirty meters between each other, and start our transect.
Hours pass, and the sun’s heat becomes threatening. Still no tortoise sightings. Tim’s mood has changed from gleeful host to flummoxed guide. The stories have shifted from pointing out food sources and horned lizards to explaining the causes for the decline in numbers. Everything gets referred back to 1979, and how bad it’s become in recent years.
Finally, out of the corner of my eye, I see one.
We get back to the car to head to the next location on Tim’s tour. Before we get in, Tim tells us to check under the tires of the car to make sure a tortoise didn’t decide to seek shade while we were walking. I like this rule. The thought of accidentally driving over a tortoise after such a long search seems tragic.
Our next stop is the Victorville compost facility, the most important stop of the day. Before we go, we make a quick stop at the Lewis Center for Educational Research. The high school is just letting out for the day when we arrive. Tim waves at the parking lot attendant as we drive up, giving me the impression that he comes here often. We weave through a stream of students towards a science classroom near the back of the school. Tim greets his friend and collaborator, Matt Huffine, and explains the mission of our day.
“We spent the morning at the natural area in California City,” Tim says, “And this afternoon I want to take him over to the compost facility to see the ravens, but I wanted to come by and show him some of our tools.”
Mr. Huffine smiles and understands. Tim and his crazy ideas must be a high school science teacher’s dream come true. Helping with the tortoise project is a real-world opportunity to understand the natural environment of the local area as well as a crash course in maker-style engineering. The students in the class have been a big part of Tim’s standing army.
He sets up his equipment up in stations along a table as if he’s about to present his own personal science fair. We start with the 3D printed tortoise shells. Tim has one real tortoise shell mixed in with three others which were printed out by a friend’s Makerbot and then painted to nearly indistinguishable accuracy. Tim shuffles them up in a humorous attempt to prove that we could hardly tell the difference.
Next, he shows us a partially built rover — a remote-control rock crawler outfitted with the same telerobotic electronics we use for our underwater robots. Having personally navigated the various states of prototypes, I know — even though this particular unit isn’t working — how close he is to completing it. It’s wholly achievable. The next station is comprised of Tim’s drone collection. He has a DJI Phantom — a popular, off-the-shelf aerial camera — that he uses for surveillance: sweeping shots of tortoise habitat as well as spying on the raven’s nests. The other drone, which he refers to it as a Ferrari, looks more sporty and durable. It’s designed to withstand crashes and to terrify the ravens. The last item in his arsenal looks dangerous. Shaped like heavy artillery, it’s a high-powered green laser.
On their own, each tool seems a little kooky. The odds of any of these devices solving the problem of raven predation are very slim, especially in their current state of development. But my visit is just a snapshot of a plan coming together. It’s important to see the bigger picture of what Tim’s trying to achieve. First, these devices are not singular solutions. They are, in fact, all the more useful when they’re mixed and matched and used together. For instance, the tortoise shell decoy could be used to trigger a drone fly-by or the green laser beam which is mounted to the rover. Secondly, and more importantly, the cost of implementing these different ideas has become vastly more affordable. A decade ago, the thought of getting a 3D printed part was not an option for anyone outside a Fortune 500 R&D lab. Now, it’s a ready possibility for anyone with imagination, even a field biologist in the Mojave. Having a drone no longer requires a military budget. And creating an internet-connected rover is remarkably possible. More than affordable, the tools are nearly expendable. Meaning the loss of one is no longer the end of the experiment, instead just a brief learning experience on the way to an improved system. Because of that, Tim didn’t need a grant to implement his ideas. He hardly even needed permission.
By the time we made it to the Victorville Compost Facility, the wind had picked up to the point where flying drones would be nearly impossible. That was fine with me, as I’d already seen a video he’d filmed of the drones scaring off entire flocks of ravens. My big interest was in seeing how the green laser would perform.
As we drove up, the scene was even more ominous than Tim had painted. Acres of black dirt was the backdrop to a colony of birds as far as the eye could see - covering the mounds, darkening the sky, and filling the trees in the surrounding hillsides. It was a raven factory. It would have been startling to witness in its own right, but with the context of Tim’s desert tour and the connections he has made to the desert tortoise populations thirty miles away, it paints an even more vivid picture. Our human-made systems — even the altruistic goals of composting — are having an impact on the biodiversity of ecosystems in ways we don’t fully understand.
The compost facility has tried to take care of this problem. They have a propane cannon that fires every few hours. The effects are minimal. Once in a while, an ambitious employee sends a bottle rocket into the thick of it, which is enough to send a few birds running. But they come back almost immediately.
We set up on a hillside overlooking the sea of black dirt. Tim gets out the laser gun and points it like an army sniper. Wanting to impress upon us the potential, he aims for maximum effect. He holds his fire until he finds the largest aggregation of ravens. Zap! As soon as he pulls the trigger there’s a domino effect of takeoffs. Waves of birds leave their meals and flee into the nearby woods. Tim repeats the process on a distant area with the same result. After a few minutes of shooting the laser at the birds, they’ve almost completely vacated the premise. Not only that, but contrary to the bottle rocket method, they’re staying away.
This is promising.
