Flipping the Birds: NYC Drones Have Local Shore Birds Pecking Mad

Opinion by Katie Compa, Odd News

In this week’s installment of “Dystopia Now,” we bring you some odd news from the fine public beaches of New York City, the “greatest” city in the “world”—in quotes because the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, still refuses to fund more hours for lifeguards at city beaches and swimming pools. Mayor, would it help to think of them as life police?

It’s generally a bad time to restrict access to the city’s bodies of water, since New York is on track to have its hottest summer ever—this year’s heat waves can’t even be convinced to take breaks in between. Meanwhile, the beaches have seen four drownings so far, which is the same number as last summer’s total drownings. 

We’re resigned to the fact that we won’t get new lifeguards anytime soon, but we do have… drones. (This feels like saying, “We may not have tomatoes, but we do have… baseballs.” Happy for you, but how does that get us pizza?) Adams apparently called the drones a “great addition to saving the lives of those that we lose over the summer,” which… wait, what?

To add to the chaos, three different city agencies—the New York Police Department, New York Fire Department, and New York Emergency Management Department—are all flying drones around the beach, looking for sharks (NYPD’s drone found one last week in, of all places, the ocean!), swimmers in trouble (some drones carry flotation devices that can be dropped—rescues to date: zero), or general emergencies (when we can’t flag down the guy with the backpack of cold beers).

But neither the drones nor their controlling agencies counted on sharing the skies with the OGs: Birds. Heard of them? Feathered dinosaurs? They’ve been patrolling these beaches since we were early primates, and they are very unhappy about the new drone encroachment (to be fair, this makes sense—where you see a drone, a douchebag is rarely far behind, usually holding the remote). No one asked for drones (except the mayor). 

Credit where it’s due: Emergency Management was the first to notice the birds’ ruffled feathers and flagged it to the NYPD and NYFD, who, unsurprisingly, hadn’t noticed any opposition to their reconnaissance patrols. Evidently, the birds see the drones as predators (accurate!) and attack them to protect their eggs. 

As long as the drones stay out over the water, which is what they claim to be patrolling (sure, RoboNarc!), everything is chill. If the birds get too stressed out about the drones flying around all the time (who wouldn’t), they might abandon their habitat in search of safer waters, which would constitute an ecological disaster according to a noted bird expert, David Bird… true!) of McGill University in Montreal.

We wish the birds all the best in their crusade against the drones. We won’t pledge to throw things at them because that would probably get us on a list (…that we’re already on).