Overview

• The USDA has outfitted quadcopter drones with thermal-imaging cameras and speakers that play alarming sounds—ranging from fireworks and gunshots to the intense argument from Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story—to chase off gray wolves.
• District supervisor Paul Wolf led the nonlethal “wolf hazing” program, which began as a government study in 2022 and expanded to hotspots like Oregon’s Klamath Basin this summer.
• Ranchers in California’s Prather Ranch and other farms, who lost as many as 40 calves over the past year, have welcomed the innovation as a way to comply with federal wolf protections while safeguarding their herds.
• Since mid-2025 deployments in Oregon and California, drone patrols have slashed livestock losses and prompted the USDA to review scaling the program to other predator-conflict areas.
• The initiative integrates high-tech surveillance with decades of wildlife behavior research and traditional hazing methods, offering a scalable model for balancing conservation and agriculture.