(Credit: YouTube)
Think the new Star Wars: Rogue One trailer is cool? Well back here on Earth, farmers are using real-life lasers to battle a perennial pest: geese.
Peter Rashleigh, a farmer and a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at the University of Victoria in Canada, has developed a new laser prototype along with five other students to fight off geese and keep them from destroying crops, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
Rashleigh tells CBC the device is an "automatic, high-tech scarecrow." Geese are very afraid of lasers, Rashleigh says, in particular green lasers, and the device scares them off during the nighttime when ordinary scare visual tactics don't do the trick. It sits on a wooden tripod about 15 feet off the ground with a black box holding the laser at the top, and is intended to sit in the middle of the field. The lasers are low-powered and similar to a laser pointer you might use during a Powerpoint presentation, and the device moves them across the field at regular intervals to frighten them away.
Farmers need a way to keep geese away from crops at night because geese come down in the evening to roost at night, and they also like to eat at that time. They particularly enjoy the newly-sprouted green shoots of common crops like wheat and barley. "They sit there all night and sort of chew away at it," Rashleigh says on CBC. "And they can do significant damage to the crop just by being there are nighttime feeding."
So, if you're looking for a good firefight, you may not need to crowd to theaters this December to see Rogue One--if this design takes off, the middle of a crop field might work just as well.
