Skip to main content

These shrieking robotic scarecrows protect offshore wind farms from seagull poop

Scaretech might sound like the latest Blumhouse horror movie, but its concept of screaming robot scarecrows is not only real but, if creator Terry Christie is correct, on the verge of becoming a gigantic hit. “It’s going to be massive,” Christie, founder and managing director of a company called Scaretech, told Digital Trends. “This is going to be huge. It’s a game-changer. This is a world-wild problem [that we’re helping to solve.]”

Recommended Videos

That problem, in a word, is poop. Seagull poop. While most land-based people might dismiss such a thing as a trivial annoyance, for those who work out at sea, on locations like offshore wind substations, it’s significantly worse than that. Guano is an extremely unpleasant, carcinogenic, substance that takes on a dust-like property when it’s disturbed. Offshore rigs are frequently covered in guano, which makes them hazardous for those working on them.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“It gets into your airways and starts depleting your immune system,” Christie explained. “The risks are absolutely [terrible] — plus it smells and is very acidic. It can actually start to burn through materials like rubber and plastic.”

Christie’s Scaretech scarecrows are an update on the centuries-old scarecrow model. It’s a solar-powered bird-deterrent robot setup designed to look like a person in a high-visibility jacket. If seagulls approach it, the bot will identify them using onboard sensors and then blast them with high-intensity strobe lights and a sustained chorus of angry coastal seabird sounds. The terrifying (to seagulls) result is enough to cause them to steer clear of what they might otherwise view as a novel public toilet site.

Scaretech
Scaretech

Scaring the poop out of seagulls. Kind of

“Imagine you’ve got this thing that looks human, that’s moving its arms and legs, firing out strobe lights and emitting this high-pitched bird alarm,” Christie said. “The whole thing combined just works absolutely brilliantly.”

Scaretech’s robot scarecrow just completed a 12-month test on a substation in the U.K.’s North Sea, which concluded last month. During that time, the guano coverage on the site (the amount of space pooped on) decreased dramatically from around 55% to virtually nothing.

As Christie noted, a one-year trial is significant not just because it shows that the technology works, but also because it shows that it works beyond the time that such anti-bird measures regularly do. “Everyone said to us the invention was great, ticked all the boxes, but they believed that, give it three or four months, and the birds would familiarize [and stop being scared,]” he said. This didn’t happen.

Scaretech is now looking to scale up its operations to offer a proven solution to others who need it. “I think the biggest problem we’re gonna have is supply and demand because the demand is going to be greater than what we can supply — at least at first,” Christie said. “I think eventually we’ll end up with our own factory rolling them out in mass production.”

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
LinkedIn may snoop on your private messages to train AI
A LinkedIn mobile app store page displayed on a mobile device.

Sharing isn't always caring, which might seem to be the case in a lawsuit in which LinkedIn was accused of sharing users' private messages with other companies to train AI models in August of last year, according to the BBC. A LinkedIn Premium user files the lawsuit in California and on behalf of "all others" in the same situation.

The lawsuit claims LinkedIn was aware of its actions by saying, "This behavior suggests that LinkedIn was fully aware that it had violated its contractual promises and privacy standards and aimed to minimize public scrutiny." The lawsuit also says, "LinkedIn's actions... indicate a pattern of attempting to cover its tracks." However, a LinkedIn spokesperson told BBC News that "these are false claims with no merit."

Read more
Heads up — fake Reddit sites are delivering dangerous malware
Reddit

Hackers are spreading a dangerous malware called Lumma Stealer by tricking you into clicking on a link in a fake Reddit thread that supposedly solves a problem, as Bleeping Computer reports. After clicking the link, the victims are transferred to a fake WeTransfer site similar to the transfer site's interface.

Sekoia Researcher crep1x found the total number of distributed sites and even shared a complete list of the participating ones. The sites are nearly 1,000: 529 impersonate Reedit, and 407 pretend to be the official WeTransfer service site. The fake Reddit or WeTransfer site uses a combination of random numbers and characters, the brand name, and either ends with a .org or .net domain.

Read more
The worst health care data breach in history just got worse
A hacker typing on an Apple MacBook laptop while holding a phone. Both devices show code on their screens.

Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth, initially reported a data breach in October last year that was considered the worst in the industry. The breach, which affected up to 100 million users, has now grown to an alarming 190 million, according to Tech Crunch. Cybercriminals reportedly exploited an employee system that lacked multi-factor authentication.

UnitedHealth confirmed the new numbers for the ransomware attack on Friday. “Change Healthcare has determined the estimated total number of individuals impacted by the Change Healthcare cyberattack is approximately 190 million,” Tyler Mason, a spokesperson for UnitedHealth Group, wrote in an email to TechCrunch.

Read more