Fake duck test shows drones and AI beat humans at bird census

In fact, it's about a thousand of them, give or take a few. An experiment using fake ducks to stand in for the real thing has found that when it comes to counting birds, drones beat humans. Jarrod Hodgson and his colleagues at the University of Adelaide in Australia had previously used aerial images from drones to count seabirds and found that the drones had a more comprehensive view of the colonies than the people trying to count them on the ground. However, neither could provide an exact count of the number individual birds. "We couldn't test for accuracy," says Hodgson.