Hyderabad: It is a collaboration between a field academician and a film music director, and their goal is to keep birds and animals at bay from agricultural fields. “The best certification we have received is the fact that farmers are refusing to return the test equipment,” says V. Vasudeva Rao of Jayashankar Telangana State Agriculture University and a key proponent of bio-acoustics.
A 1986 study pegged India’s crop loss due to birds at a whopping 55%. Birds and wild animals cause a massive loss to farmers as they consume the crop before and during harvest.
Distress sounds
“We have discovered key distress and alarm sounds that the birds make when they feel threatened as well as predatory sounds. We have captured those sounds and are using them to keep birds at bay. At present we have achieved 89% success rate using call sequence of 17.36 minutes duration of 17 species at 110 Db. Some birds will ignore all sounds when their life is under threat or when they have to feed the chicks — and that is the 11% loss,” says Mr. Rao.
Helping Mr. Rao in this cross-disciplinary field work is music director Seshu K.M.R., who has worked on a number of Telugu movies, including Ab Tak Chappan-II . “Birds and animals are intelligent. They can decipher sounds and even remember them, and hence we randomise them using vast library of sounds available to us. We also add geolocation sounds, including breeze, so that the birds are confused,” says Mr. Seshu.
“The ambient sounds that a bird in Adilabad is used to hearing will be different from the one in Medak. And we use a technology called flowsound to ensure natural sounds,” he adds.
Collection of sounds
“The first step in this was collection of sounds, and then we did a sonogram analysis to find the most effective sounds. These sounds were then amplified by Seshu and his team and they added the geolocation information to make it more natural. Each instrument can keep birds at bay on in 15 acres of land,” says Mr. Rao about the solar powered equipment that has a chip containing the sounds which is that are broadcast around feeding time of birds. The current cost of the equipment is ₹30,000 which he and his team are trying to bring down to ₹15,000.
Animal experiments
Can a similar technology be used for animals? “Yes, we tried with monkeys in Khammam and it was effective for seven days. On the eighth day, a monkey came and sat beside the speaker and peered into it,” says Mr. Rao with a laugh. But undeterred, Mr. Rao and his team are now working on bio-acoustics to keep the menace of leopards at bay in areas on the fringes of forests.
