A quadcopter, a drone with four propeller blades, launched vertically from a small, circular, red helicopter pad. It hovered for a moment above the field near the shops at the Aquinnah Cliffs, then took off toward the South Shore and became a fleck on the horizon as the sun started to set.
For a three-week period that started in mid-February, three drones are launched daily from more than 100 preapproved spots, and flown from dusk to dawn above the Island to collect and mark the heat signatures of deer. It is one part of an escalated, multipronged effort to establish the magnitude and whereabouts of the Island’s deer population, and thereby address the health risk of tick-borne conditions that are more prevalent on the Island than anywhere else in the state.
This aerial deer survey, a project commissioned and paid for by the nonprofit Tick Free Martha’s Vineyard (Tick Free MV), and performed by independent conservation nonprofit White Buffalo, is almost complete; as of Tuesday, March 4, only 13 percent of the Island was left to survey, which is about two more full nights of drone flights. Weather, especially from the blizzard, hampered the effort for only a day last week. However, on Tuesday this week, pilots didn’t fly in the rain; wind gusts higher than 35 mph can also halt work. The snow actually produces a better contrast for the thermal cameras to track the deer, which is the reason drone surveys are normally done in the winter for East Coast states.
Still, the survey, conducted west to east, should be done by the projected deadline of Saturday, March 7. Jason Boulanger, head of research for the conservation nonprofit, said that all that’s left to do is survey Chappaquiddick, as of Thursday, March 5. White Buffalo, which specializes in deer management, uses infrared thermal drone and camera technology, flown at below 400 feet, to determine both the size and distribution of the Island’s deer population. Pilots certified by the Federal Aviation Administration from White Buffalo performed a demo for reporters in Aquinnah on Monday.
The final report, estimated to be completed and handed to Tick Free MV by the end of March, will include all the electronic data, such as individual points where deer are located, as well as a spatial statistical analysis that can map out deer density. The program that White Buffalo uses takes all deer locations and determines “relative hot spots” across the Island, Boulanger said. There could be micro-distribution changes, he said, seasonally, but because Martha’s Vineyard is an island, the deer can only go so far. “It’s a pretty safe bet that you’ll be counting the deer that exist on the Island,” he said. Tick Free MV plans to disseminate the report to the public.
This is important information in the eyes of those involved in Tick Free MV, established in December with the hope of reducing tick-borne diseases and allergies through a reduction of the number of ticks in the environment. But to do that, they have to target deer, one of the primary hosts of ticks. “I believe that our Islanders want as much information as possible to make informed decisions together,” Virginia Barbatti, executive director of Tick Free MV, told The Times in an interview. It is a sentiment also shared by hunters who want to understand the extent of the problem here.
The drones are flown in a grid pattern, which Boulanger compared to a lawnmower: “You know, go forward and you turn around and you come back, you go forward, and you have this swath of freshly cut grass.” It’s the same concept for drone surveys. There are preprogrammed transects, a straight line or path used in a study, that the drone follows. When pilots see deer in an area, which is noticeable with a white heat signature on the controller from the thermal camera, then they can stop the drone and use the image-stabilizer camera to zoom in and out, and change angles, to investigate the area.
Then, as the pilot sees the deer in real-time, he can use the remote controller, which acts like an iPad that has video-game-like toggles to steer, move, and zoom the camera, and the touch-sensitive screen to mark the location of a deer, which is then saved as a GPS waypoint. The pilots are trained in-house, and attend the latest drone technology conferences, and though they fly over people’s homes, are skilled enough to focus only on the white signals of deer-size animals, which can be coyotes or dogs. Everything else is just noise, Boulanger noted about Islanders’ concerns that the drones fly over people’s homes. All sites, owned by the towns, tribe, and private landowners, were preapproved, and no identifiable images of people, faces, or homes are taken.
“What we’re going to get, overall for the Island and all the different towns, is the actual locations of where deer were seen on that particular night,” Boulanger said. These singular spots can be used together to determine overall density and hot spots.
White Buffalo works in areas where state wildlife agencies struggle to keep deer populations in check. For decades, agencies utilized recreational hunting to manage the deer population, Boulanger said, but development and the expansion of suburbia created massive expanses of habitat perfect for white-tailed deer. “Deer don’t prefer to be in the woods or the fields or in rural areas,” Boulanger said. “They prefer to be in suburban environments ,because there are few predators, and there’s no hunting, and they’re subsidized by all these wonderful ornamental plantings that they can feed off of.”
This is where Boulanger said municipalities “run into trouble,” and see an increase in vehicle collisions, tick-borne conditions, and damage to agriculture. In Massachusetts, and especially Martha’s Vineyard, that’s particularly true: As the Island becomes more developed, there are virtually no predators, and laws for hunters are stricter here than in most of the country. There are, however, recent efforts to change that.
White Buffalo, a national organization that conducts conservation research, used to focus on sharpshooting efforts for deer management, but eventually expanded to nonlethal efforts, such as surgical sterilization of male deer through vasectomies, and ovariectomies for female deer. They also act as consultants for municipalities, and run focus groups and conduct internet and mail surveys in addition to the drone surveys.
The drone surveys are more popular now, Boulanger said. It was more than a decade ago that the last survey was conducted through traditional aircraft by the Martha’s Vineyard boards of health. It found that there were roughly 50 deer per square mile, compared with 19 deer per square mile on the mainland. But this survey uses more advanced technology, Boulanger said.