Nature still has an edge over technology as a hawk wins over a drone in aerial combat.
In the captured video, neither the hawk nor the drone suffered any damage, but the hawk did show who was truly king of the skies.
Christoper Schmidt, a software developer and resident of Cambridgeport in Cambridge, Mass. took his quadcopter out to Magazine Beach to take a video of the changing color of the tree foliage.
Schmidt has been flying the device about twice a week since he purchased it half a year ago, creating and uploading several videos on his page in YouTube. He is able to take the videos using a GoPro camera that he installed on the drone's frame.
Whenever Schmidt flies his quadcopter, he says that the drone often encounters a few birds but passes by without any incident.
However, on the day that the video was taken, Schmidt saw that a hawk was in the area where his drone was flying in.
"My turning the quadcopter, as you can see in the video, was an attempt to move away from the area that he was circling, since I had seen him in the park earlier," Schmidt said in an interview with Boston.com. "As he flew closer, I first thought 'that will be an interesting shot.'"
The incident that unfolded, however, saw the hawk closing in on the quadcopter. The hawk attacked the camera of the drone then flew away in triumph as the quadcopter fell from the skies to the ground.
"Equipment is fine. The reason it dropped was entirely because my first reaction was to reduce throttle to reduce any risk to the hawk. It fell straight down," Schmidt wrote in an email to the Washington Post. "The hawk seemed completely non-plussed; he flew off without any signs of damage."
The video has gone viral on the Internet as view counts continue to increase. Schmidt said that he will be donating a portion of the proceeds that the video makes to the Mass Audobon society.
The Mass Audobon society is the largest conservation organization in New England, dedicated to protecting the nature of Massachusetts. It currently has over 100,000 members concerned with land conservation in an area of 35,000 acres.
