Veterinarians successfully removed the debris from the juvenile Salvin's albatross. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A rare seabird is recovering from a successful and life-saving surgery. A fisherman from Anconcito, Ecuador, found the juvenile Salvin's albatross after he noticed that it appeared unwell. The bird had ingested four large fishing hooks and some fishing line and was brought to Puerto Lopez for rehabilitation and care.

Monocular 3D detectors achieve remarkable performance on cars and smaller objects. However, their performance drops on larger objects, leading to fatal accidents. Some attribute the failures to training data scarcity or their receptive field requirements of large objects. In this paper, we highlight this understudied problem of generalization to large objects. We find that modern frontal detectors struggle to generalize to large objects even on nearly balanced datasets. We argue that the cause of failure is the sensitivity of depth regression losses to noise of larger objects. To bridge this gap, we comprehensively investigate regression and dice losses, examining their robustness under varying error levels and object sizes. We mathematically prove that the dice loss leads to superior noise-robustness and model convergence for large objects compared to regression losses for a simplified case. Leveraging our theoretical insights, we propose SeaBird (Segmentation in Bird's View) as the first step towards generalizing to large objects. SeaBird effectively integrates BEV segmentation on foreground objects for 3D detection, with the segmentation head trained with the dice loss. SeaBird achieves SoTA results on the KITTI-360 leaderboard and improves existing detectors on the nuScenes leaderboard, particularly for large objects. Code and models at https://github.com/abhi1kumar/SeaBird

The Animal Legal Defense Fund announced Thursday a reward of $5,000 for information on the person or people who operated a drone that crashed-landed in May into nesting grounds at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach. About 3,000 elegant terns -- notable for their orange bills and black crests -- fled the reserve after the crash in mid-May. They left behind 1,500 to 2,000 unsavable eggs, the largest abandonment that scientists who work there could remember. The operators of drones that fly over state wildlife preserves and disturb habitats can face charges for nest destruction and harassment of wildlife, according to Officer Nick Molsberry of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Tim Daly, a spokesperson for the agency, said that he had no knowledge of the drone operator in the Bolsa Chica incident having been identified or of the birds having returned to the reserve, which spans more than 1,000 acres.

Using drones and artificial intelligence to monitor large colonies of seabirds can be as effective as traditional on-the-ground methods, while reducing costs, labor and the risk of human error, a new study finds. Scientists at Duke University and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) used a deep-learning algorithm--a form of artificial intelligence--to analyze more than 10,000 drone images of mixed colonies of seabirds in the Falkland Islands off Argentina's coast. The Falklands, also known as the Malvinas, are home to the world's largest colonies of black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophris) and second-largest colonies of southern rockhopper penguins (Eudyptes c. chrysocome). Hundreds of thousands of birds breed on the islands in densely interspersed groups. The deep-learning algorithm correctly identified and counted the albatrosses with 97% accuracy and the penguins with 87%.

Eggs littered the sand, but there was no sign of life around or in them. The seabirds that should have been keeping watch had taken off, terrified by a drone that crash-landed into their nesting grounds on an island at the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. "We've never seen such devastation here," said Melissa Loebl, an environmental scientist who manages the Huntington Beach reserve. "This has been really hard for me as a manager." Some 3,000 elegant terns fled the reserve after the drone crashed May 12, leaving behind 1,500 to 2,000 eggs, none of them viable.

Unravelling the secrets of wild animals is one of the biggest challenges in ecology, with bio-logging (i.e., the use of animal-borne loggers or bio-loggers) playing a pivotal role in tackling this challenge. Bio-logging allows us to observe many aspects of animals’ lives, including their behaviours, physiology, social interactions, and external environment. However, bio-loggers have short runtimes when collecting data from resource-intensive (high-cost) sensors. This study proposes using AI on board video-loggers in order to use low-cost sensors (e.g., accelerometers) to automatically detect and record complex target behaviours that are of interest, reserving their devices’ limited resources for just those moments. We demonstrate our method on bio-loggers attached to seabirds including gulls and shearwaters, where it captured target videos with 15 times the precision of a baseline periodic-sampling method. Our work will provide motivation for more widespread adoption of AI in bio-loggers, helping us to shed light onto until now hidden aspects of animals’ lives. Joseph Korpela et al. demonstrate the use of machine-learning assisted bio-loggers on black-tailed gulls and streaked shearwaters. As video recording is only activated through variations in movement detected by low-cost accelerometers, this method represents improvements to runtime and precision over existing bio-logging technology.

Puffins use wooden sticks as tools to scratch, groom themselves and possibly dislodge ticks -- suggesting that the seabirds may be smarter than was thought. Tool use is rare behaviour for animals -- an activity largely confined to primates and perching birds when engaging in complex, often feeding-related, tasks. However, zoologists led from the University of Oxford have reported two sightings of puffin tool-use, one from Iceland and the other from Pembrokeshire, Wales. Puffins use wooden sticks as tools to scratch, groom themselves and possibly dislodge ticks -- suggesting that the seabirds may be smarter than was thought. Tool use is rare behaviour for animals.

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.