A noisy flashing drone could stop bats crashing into wind turbines

A drone equipped with lights and speakers can deter bats from wind farms to protect them from potentially deadly turbine blades

By Jeremy Hsu

A noisy glashing drone could keep bats away from wind turbines, which kill millions of the flying mammals each year.

“When people first started to notice that animals were getting hit by wind turbines, the focus was really on birds,” says Yuval Werber at the University of Haifa in Israel. “It took a few years longer to understand that bats were getting hit, and during those few years a lot of wind farms were being built.”

Thousands of wind turbines around …