I hope you get the joke in the preheader in this email. (If you can’t see it, it says “Once again, the eagles prove less useful than one would hope.”) — Dan

Drone cameras are pretty cool, giving us perspectives that we’d normally not have access to. They hover over concerts, zip around airports, and are used by marketing teams and filmmakers to tell stories that we’d otherwise miss. But they’re hardly perfect. They occasionally crash into places they shouldn't be, make noise in areas that don’t want them, and — if used nefariously — can spy on people in ways few of us would tolerate. As a result, drones can be a headache for law enforcement. Dealing with rogue drones means deploying high-tech countermeasures — jamming signals, launching interceptor drones with nets, or developing sophisticated electronic systems to take control of the aircraft remotely.

Or training birds to do the work.

Drones fly — that’s what makes them cool. That airspace was previously the domain of birds, and for centuries, people have trained birds to do our bidding (including scaring away other birds). And in 2016, Dutch police decided to use that centuries-old trick to fight against rogue drones. Specifically, they hired eagles.

The police spokesperson, Dennis Janus, framed it to the Guardian as “a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem,” but it was still a rather innovative one — the Dutch force became the first in the world to officially employ birds of prey as part of their anti-drone arsenal. The concept was straightforward: eagles, it turns out, are very good at grabbing things out of the sky. They've been doing it for millions of years. The fact that those things are now made of plastic and lithium batteries instead of feathers and flesh doesn't seem to bother them much.

The police partnered with a company called Guard From Above to train the birds. Tests began in early 2015, and the results were encouraging, with Janus noting that “none of the eagles were hurt, but as for the drones, none of them survived." The birds treated the buzzing quadcopters as prey, snatching them mid-flight and carrying them off to wherever they felt safe. This gave police an advantage over other methods: they could control where the captured drone ended up, rather than having it crash unpredictably after being disabled. It seemed like a win across the board.

Unfortunately, reality had other plans.

First, the objections came from animal rights groups — they were concerned that the eagles might be injured by the spinning rotors, but police dismissed those worries, and went into testing. Approximately 100 police officers were trained to work with the birds, according to the BBC, and the flying squad was expected to go into action the next summer.

The bigger problem turned out to be much less dramatic eagles are still eagles. Per Dutch Drone publication Drones.nl, employing birds turned out to be neither reliable or cost-effective. An eagle might be remarkably effective at grabbing a drone in a controlled demonstration, but police needed something they could count on in the real world. The birds required continual training and reinforcement, and there simply weren't enough opportunities to deploy them to justify the expense.

So in 2017, the Dutch police abandoned the program. The eagles had proved that they could catch drones. They just hadn't proved that they could do it often enough — or predictably enough — to make them a practical police tool.

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Today’s Bonus fact: If you're in the U.S. and you come across a dead eagle, you may want to give the government a call. The National Eagle Repository, operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service near Denver, collects dead bald and golden eagles and distributes them to enrolled members of federally recognized Native American tribes for religious and cultural purposes. The repository receives about 2,000 eagles a year, but demand is so high that roughly 6,000 people are on its waiting list.

From the Archives: The Worthless $65 Million Masterpiece That Cost $29 Million: Yes, this involves eagles. Well, one eagle.

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And thanks! — Dan