ABOVE: Check out the hawk vs. drone battle! (Credit: Christopher Schmidt)
Like Snoopy lying on his dog house, a leisurely afternoon looking skyward suddenly turned into an aerial dogfight.
But in this case, it wasn’t the Red Baron who menaced the skies – and unlike Snoopy’s daydreams, this battle was both real, and brief.
Software developer and amateur drone pilot Christopher Schmidt was taking his FC40 quadcopter drone out for a spin in a public park in Cambridge, Massachusetts Wednesday when he inadvertently got the attention of a nearby hawk.
Whether out of hunger, territorial protection, or because he just doesn’t like drones, the hawk suddenly launched himself at the hovering drone.
And because Schmidt had attached a GoPro camera to his drone, the entire battle was caught on video.
“As far as I could tell, the hawk came out unscathed, and having defeated his prey, was happy to retreat,” Schmidt wrote in a posting on YouTube. “As soon as he flew at me, I throttled down the props to try to minimize any harm to the bird.”
“The quadcopter came out unscathed as well.”
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