ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – After years of trying to replicate how birds fly, Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian figured he could borrow some blueprints from Mother Nature.

“We thought that maybe it’s good idea to use the whole body of the birds, because everything is there, and we just need to do a reverse engineering and turn them to a drone,” said Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian, a New Mexico Tech mechanical engineering professor.

The abnormal-looking bird are actually drones built from the bodies of taxidermied birds, and retrofitted with robotic technology allowing them to move and fly like real birds – and that’s the point.

“The current drones that they are being used for wildlife monitoring, like hexacopter or quadcopter, they create lots of noise, and animals will be scared and scattered,” said Hassanalian.

Most of the drones blend in, giving wildlife researches an eye inside the flock. 

“Developing this technology can fly with the flock, can give us more information about the physics of the flight of the birds, how birds with different colors, they can be more efficient,” Hassanalian said. “So this technology can help us to learn about how birds extract energy from the atmosphere, or how they can save energy to their flight.” 

There’s also aquatic drones like a duck, but researchers at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology know the real world potential for the mostly inconspicuous drones is sky-high, especially at airports that are prone to bird strikes.

“Imagine that we do this with the predator birds, and you fly that around the airports, and you no longer see those birds around the airplanes, and that can save the birds as well as the airplanes,” said Hassanalian.

Border security is also on the table.

“The drones that are currently being used for border patrolling, sometimes they shoot down by like illegals, right? So this technology can help, because they’re birds, and we can fly them, and they can be used for monitoring,” Hassanalian said.

But Hassanalian draws the line when it comes to surveillance.

“That has not been our intention at all. We are not looking at that application because we don’t think that’s an efficient way, and it’s not moral, it’s not ethical,” said Hassanalian.

Hassanalian says he’s working to develop a drone major at New Mexico Tech and hopes innovative projects like this inspire younger students to look to the skies.

“I think these things that we are trying to build here, it can help to create a pathway for future generation of students that they want to do their career in aerospace industry,” said Hassanalian. 

Hassanalian says there’s a new drone research facility under construction at New Mexico Tech right now, and he’s interested in branching out into other animals like snakes and frogs.

The research team also built a turkey drone from a taxidermied bird. Hassanalian says it’s more of a fun Thanksgiving project that will be used during school demonstrations to inspire younger students to think outside of the box.

“We have a message for K-12, for students, for the teachers, that if they think high, they can fly high,” said Hassanalian. “That sometimes we can be innovative and we make the impossible possible. So turkey doesn’t fly by nature, but we’ll fly it.” 

He says the team is currently figuring out how to get that flying turkey to drop eggs with candy in them, another incentive for those young students.