This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher in D'Alga.

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Studying birds for a living might sound like a cool job, but it's not without its logistical

challenges for us land-bound animals.

I had a northern gennett, so a really large bird breathing on the top of a cliff.

David Gremie, a seabird ecologist at the French National Center for Scientific

research.

And from the bottom of the cliff I couldn't see what was happening in that nest. I couldn't even see whether the bird was home or not.

Gremier says technology offers a simple solution.

A drone carefully flown at high altitude over the colony would have been really helpful.

That's right, a drone.

Gremier says scientists and citizens alike are increasingly using drones to approach birds,

either for fun or legitimate research, but they're taking

flight without knowing how the aerial robots might affect their avian study subjects.

So Gremie and his colleagues hit the zoo, employing a professional drone pilot to fly test

runs near Mallard Ducks with a 14 inch diameter quadcopter.

They then got permission to repeat the experiment on wild flamingos and green shanks in the Camarg, a huge wetland in southern France.

After several hundred flights, the researchers found that the birds didn't seem to care about the drone's color or approach speech. the as long as they didn't approach from overhead, an angle associated with predators.

The studies in the journal biology letters.

All these high-tech tools could be a boon to wildlife ecologists.

But at the same time, you always have to assess the impact of

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