Photographers, drones and the etiquette that has not caught up

Most explanations of drones in wild places stop at the point where it starts to matter. This one carries on.

The rules are national and local

Most jurisdictions require operator registration, competency testing and adherence to height and distance limits. On top of that, individual national parks, nature reserves and landowners frequently prohibit take-off and landing. Flying legally under national rules while taking off from prohibited land is a common and avoidable error.

Airspace is a third layer again, since restrictions around airfields, temporary ones over incidents and events, and controlled airspace reaching down into remote valleys all apply whatever the landowner thinks, and some of them change from day to day.

Wildlife disturbance is real

Nesting birds, particularly cliff-nesting seabirds and raptors, respond to drones as they would to a predator. Disturbance during nesting can cause abandonment, and in many countries disturbing specified species is an offence.

Livestock, particularly sheep with lambs and cattle with calves, are also readily panicked. The reaction is strongest to something approaching from above or at their own level, which is exactly how a drone flies, and it is why birds that ignore a walker on the clifftop path will leave a ledge en masse for a machine a hundred metres out.

The social objection

People go to wild places substantially for quiet, and a drone is audible over a wide area. This is the source of most of the hostility, and it is a reasonable objection rather than technophobia.

Over a season, flying away from other people, briefly, addresses most of it. What carries is the sound rather than the sight, because there is nothing in quiet country to mask it, so a machine that looks like a distant speck is still perfectly audible to somebody a valley away who came for the silence.

Practical courtesy

Ask before flying near others, keep flights short, avoid nesting cliffs entirely in season, and do not fly over livestock. Landing and taking off away from paths and summits reduces the disturbance most people actually experience. Publishing footage of a flight in a prohibited area is how enforcement usually begins.

In practice, asking generally works, since most landowners and reserve managers will agree to a short flight at a stated time and place, and the refusals almost all follow from people who did not ask and were seen doing it.

Ground photography has its own etiquette

Trampling vegetation for a composition, baiting wildlife and disclosing nest locations all cause documented harm. Several raptor species have been persecuted after locations were shared publicly.

Withholding precise locations for sensitive species is standard practice among experienced wildlife photographers. The workable rule in the field is to watch behaviour rather than distance, because an animal that stops feeding, stands up or keeps looking at you has already been disturbed, and the right response is to withdraw rather than to wait for a better frame.

The exception is usually weather, which overrides most planning.

A lost drone is litter with a battery in it

Cold cuts battery capacity sharply, and a machine reporting adequate charge on the ground can lose it quickly at altitude into a headwind, which is how drones end up in gullies and lochans. A crashed aircraft in remote terrain is usually unrecoverable, and it leaves a lithium cell, carbon fibre and electronics in a catchment somebody downstream drinks from.

Locally, flying anywhere near an active mountain rescue or air ambulance operation is a serious matter, because a small aircraft is effectively invisible to a helicopter crew and grounds them until they are satisfied the airspace is clear. Both considerations point the same way: fly in settled conditions, keep flights short and within easy walking reach of where you launched, and land at once if anything with a rotor appears over the ridge.

The takeaway

Check the landowner rule as well as the aviation rule, and never fly at a nesting cliff.

Go slowly enough to notice, and most of this stops being advice and starts being obvious.