Forest ranger Erik de Jonge is collecting fawns, complete duck nests and pheasant chicks from the fields in the De Brabantse Wal nature reserve this week. He uses a drone with a thermal camera. In this way he wants to prevent the animals from being accidentally swallowed when the fields are mowed. “Once you’ve seen a fawn get hit by a mower, you become very fanatical about this job.”
As early as five o’clock on Wednesday morning, he was in the nature reserve between Woensdrecht and Bergen op Zoom. It’s a daily shot this week, because from mid-June farmers are allowed to mow the fields in the nature reserve. But not before Erik and his colleagues have inspected the fields.
These days, checking can be done a lot more efficiently than years ago. Once they walked across a field with seventy people to find young animals.
“We pick up the youngest animals with gloves.”
“Then we sometimes missed a calf, you really don’t want to experience that. On Tuesday we found a one-day-old fawn with the thermal camera. We had overlooked that in the old way,” says the forester of Brabants Landschap.
Erik stands along the field with his colleagues and a drone pilot during the job. The drone flies over the field with a thermal camera. Erik watches on a screen during the flight. “If you see a white dot lighting up, there’s probably something there. The camera zooms in so you can see what it is. With this thermal camera you can even see mice walking.”
Then he steps into the field to look for the animal. The drone pilot gives clues about the exact spot. “We would prefer that a fawn run away on its own, then we ensure that the animal goes into the bushes. But the youngest animals remain lying down. Then we pick them up with gloves, so that there is as little of our scent on them as possible.”
“You don’t want to see and hear how such an animal runs through the field screaming.”
As soon as a field has been searched, he calls the farmer so that he can start mowing immediately. “The cooperation is going very well, because the farmer also does not want to see an animal end up in his mower. He really cannot see the animals with the naked eye.”
He himself was once an eyewitness when a fawn ended up in a mower. “You don’t want to see and hear how such an animal runs through the field screaming with mown legs. Once you’ve experienced that once, you become very fanatical about this work.”
After three days of getting up early, the counter now stands at twenty fawns. “Today we found no less than ten. But we also removed young hares and tiny chicks of a pheasant and put them in the bushes. When we find complete nests, we put sticks around them so that the farmer mows around them.”
“We saw from a height of 120 meters how a deer fed her calf.”
François Coppens is a drone pilot and was in the field next to Erik on Wednesday morning. According to him, the technology of drones and thermal cameras is getting better.
“This morning we saw from a height of 120 meters how a deer fed her calf in the tall grass. They can’t hear the drone and we were able to zoom in very far. We saw how the female fed her calf. You don’t normally see something like that, that’s really very special.”
