
Scarecrow 2.0: A Robot With a Laser Eye
Some remarkable scarecrows are appearing in the cornfields of Rhode Island in the USA. They are in fact robots equipped with lasers. There is scientific evidence that this is the best way to protect crops.
Sweet corn is a popular product in the United States, where it is grown and sold in huge quantities. However, birds also enjoy eating corn. They tear the leaves off the cobs and peck at the kernels, which can easily cause major damage to fields and crops.
Guns
The commonest method of protecting corn from the birds is a bird scaring gun. The loud bangs startle the birds and they fly away. To prevent the birds coming back, the guns have to be fired several times a day over many days - from the time the corn becomes attractive to birds until the harvest. Most farms set their guns to fire regularly from early July until September, and this is also the biggest disadvantage of this bird control method: guns are easy to deploy on a large scale, but they cause serious noise pollution to nearby residents.
Balloons
Visual deterrents are a less annoying alternative - at least for the neighbours. Vision is the most important sense for birds: they use their eyes to navigate, find food, detect threats and more. Visual deterrents such as scary balloons and scarecrows have been used for some time, but these quickly lose their effectiveness if they are not relocated frequently enough. Farmers spend a lot of time and effort doing this.
The laser scarecrow
One solution that has increasingly attracted interest among corn farmers in recent years is the use of lasers. A laser beam can scare birds off the fields. Waving a hand-held laser works fine ... but the birds invariably come back as soon as you pack away the laser.
This problem led to the idea of automated laser scarecrows. No more noise pollution, no laborious relocating, just a terrifying "eye"! Scientists at the University of Rhode Island decided to test this: they designed a portable battery-powered robotic bird scarer that moved a green laser beam continually across the field.
Reduced damage
The laser bird scarer was deployed in cornfields in Rhode Island from 2017 to 2020. Half of each field was illuminated by the laser at a time, while the other half was left untouched to act as a control. After three years the results were clear: the corn suffered significantly less damage when the laser bird scarer was used.
All the farmer needs to do to stop birds from eating their crops is install a robotic scarecrow with a laser eye, change its batteries before they run out ... and perhaps plant a hedge around the field so that the neighbours don’t suffer from terrifying sleepless nights.