Zombie bird drone takes flight in New Mexico

Look in the sky! It’s a bird. A dead bird! A dead-bird drone? A team of scientists at New Mexico Tech created a flying “franken-bird.” Well, technically two flying franken-birds.

Their synthetic body parts are fused with real pheasant heads and feathers. The mechanical bodies are adorned with pigeon feathers.

Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian leads the team of researchers on the project at the Autonomous Flight and Aquatic Systems Laboratory at New Mexico Tech. The team presented their work last month at the SciTech Forum, which is hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Hassanalian’s robo-bird needs some more fine-tuning before it’s mistaken for an actual bird. However, it can glide, hover in place, and soar on thermal currents.

Hassanalian said future models of the robot birds could hypothetically be used as spy drones by the military. It’s a prospect similar to the CIA’s now defunct Project Aquiline. In the midst of the Cold War, the CIA proposed a fleet of nuclear-powered drones that were designed to look like birds to spy on the Russians.

But Hassanalian told Popular Science he didn’t design the zombie bird drone with military uses in mind.

The taxidermized avian cyborg was built to help wildlife researchers better study wildlife. The idea is animals will be more accepting of a drone if it looks like them, or sort of like them. There are also biological discoveries the team at New Mexico Tech might learn with more mimicry. For instance, how real birds conserve energy while flying. Or how feather color may impact flight because of heat absorption and airflow.

Dr. Hassanalian’s team worked with a local taxidermy artist in New Mexico to procure the necessary items for their bird drones. No living birds were harmed in the creation the mechanical creatures. But some nightmares were surely conjured, at least in the mind of this author.