Flapping drone mimicking peregrine falcon gives hope to strawberry growers

Harry Lagastes and Jill Viccars with a RoBird drone. (ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols)

Birds cause more than $300 million in Australian crop losses annually.

A drone mimicking a peregrine falcon is being trialled to protect strawberries.

The trial, funded by Hort Innovation, will run for three years.

A drone mimicking a peregrine falcon is giving hope to farmers losing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of strawberries to ravenous rainbow lorikeets.

The robotic raptor has the same size, silhouette and flight patterns of the world's fastest bird.

It flaps flexible polyfoam wings during 15-minute windows on rechargeable batteries.

The RoBird needs to be thrown in the air to launch. (ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols)

Launched with an overarm throw, the RoBird weighs less than a kilogram and was designed to protect food crops without harming native wildlife.

"We're only hazing or going after the birds that the farmers know eat the crops, in this case rainbow lorikeets and cockatoos," drone pilot Harry Lagastes said.

The trial is being funded by Hort Innovation. (ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols)

Queensland strawberry growers gathered at TSL Family Farms, an hour's drive north-west of Brisbane, to learn more about a three-year joint trial with Canadian-based AERIUM Analytics, funded by Hort Innovation's Frontiers project.

AERIUM Analytics chief growth officer Jill Viccars said flying and fixed-wing versions of the RoBird had been successfully used overseas to deter birds at airports and mining sites.

Its horticultural trials began last year in Victoria and South Australia, focusing on stone fruit, apples and almonds.

"The almond trial ran for four and a half to five months, and we did a treated versus untreated site," Ms Viccars said.

"We saw an 89 per cent reduction in fruit damage, so we were obviously very excited about that.

"Our second year of operations in almonds is going to be looking at how we scale [expand]."

TSL Family Farms co-owner Laura Wells was eager to host RoBird's first Queensland trial.

Laura Wells hopes the RoBird can help cut fruit losses to rainbow lorikeets. (ABC Rural: Jennifer Nichols)

Her family moved from growing strawberries in the ground to tabletop production to reduce backbreaking labour, soil-borne disease, weed growth and the need for agricultural chemicals.

But they hadn't predicted that raising the crop's height would create a strawberry snack bar for rainbow lorikeets, costing, in the farm's worst year, "$200,000 in just a couple of weeks in early crop loss".

Lorikeets damage the fruit. (Supplied: Taste’n’See S