Pioneering KKL-JNF laser beam tech aims to keep wild cranes off farmers’ fields
First-of-its kind system in world uses cameras, lasers and AI without harming birds; it’s set to debut next year at newly reopened Hula Lake Park, where crane numbers are down due to war
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
The chief ornithologist of the KKL-JNF Jewish National Fund has initiated work on what will be the world’s first laser-based “chaser” to keep gray cranes that migrate through Israel in their tens of thousands from decimating farmers’ fields.
Yaron Charka, who worked in tech before pivoting to nature preservation, has teamed up with an Israeli company called Avant Guard to develop the system, which combines a laser beam with artificial intelligence.
A camera scans the fields once a minute and AI helps identifies where the cranes are and directs the laser beam, which the birds perceive as a creature that is chasing them. (It doesn’t touch or harm them.) The beam reaches up to one kilometer and covers an area of three square kilometers as it rotates.
Development is now in its fourth year and Charka hopes it will be ready to deploy by October next year, when the 2025 winter migration starts.
He told The Times of Israel that the tech could potentially be used for other purposes, for example to keep wild pigs away.
Many of Israel’s valleys were once marshland that provided rich pickings for the half a billion or so birds that migrate through Israel twice yearly between Eastern Europe/Western Asia and Africa, among them around 90,000 gray cranes.
Most of the land has been drained to provide for development and agriculture, but part of the Hula Valley was re-flooded in the 1990s to help restore the local ecosystem.
Farmers began planting corn and peanuts in the newly re-moistened soil — exactly the crops cranes like to eat. And that led to confrontation.
So the Israel Nature and Parks Authority started to feed them to keep them away from the agricultural land and in the park instead.
Because there was readily available food, some 30,000 to 40,000 cranes coming in the fall decided to stay for the winter and only leave in early to mid-March. The result was overcrowding that was blamed for the lightning-quick spread of bird flu in 2021. This spread from poultry sheds to wild birds, killing around 8,000 cranes, mainly in and around the Hula Lake.
In 2022, amid fears of another outbreak, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority met with the farmers and other involved bodies and agreed on a five-year plan to phase out the park feeding.
But the government fell before the farmers could get a financial commitment that they would be compensated for the expected damage to their crops, as the birds returned to graze on their fields. That commitment remains to be made.
The lasers could replace both the function of feeding and the loud sirens operated from a tractor to shoo the birds off the fields.
The Hula Valley Park reopened Sunday after 14 months, following last month’s ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon. Hezbollah started firing rockets into Israel on October 8 last year, following the bloody invasion of Hamas terrorists from Gaza into southern Israel the day before, during which 1,200 people were massacred and 251 abducted to the Strip.
Those of the park’s employees living close to the northern border were evacuated from their homes. If not called up for reserve duty, they subsequently commuted to the park daily, spending considerable time in the bomb shelters.
The noise of incoming rockets from Lebanon and their interception by Israel’s Iron Dome system is apparently the reason for a decrease in cranes at the Hula site last winter and this year.
Said Charka, “We know from research that birds avoid areas of war. Scientists fitted GPS tags to greater spotted eagles in Eastern Europe and saw that they avoided the war in Ukraine. When I came to the Hula Lake Park last winter and this winter, I noticed a lot fewer birds and fewer species. There were perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 cranes.”
But other factors could also help to explain the drop, Charka added, including bird flu and climate change. With winters getting warmer, it was possible that many more birds were choosing to stay in places such as Turkey rather than fly to Israel or further onto Africa
Inbar Shlomit Rubin, who manages the park site for the KKL-JNF, said the cranes had to be given time to readjust to visitors after not seeing them for 14 months.
