Oldtimr

Lancaster Newspaper

You gotta love you tube, where the stupid go to prove it.


A Lancaster teen has been fined for flying a drone and flushing migrating snow geese at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area.

The March incident is one of a handful of drone incidents at Middle Creek this spring and another at the famous Eagle Cam nest in York County that led to a Pennsylvania Game Commission proposal to ban drones from flying anywhere on 1.5 million acres of game lands statewide.

On Tuesday, District Justice Tony Russell of Ephrata fined Zachary Sowers, 19, the minimum $1,000 on a Game Commission wildlife code misdemeanor violation of disturbing wildlife.


Sowers could have received up to a $1,500 fine and up to 90 days in jail for the violation.

Sowers, who had pleaded not guilty and was represented by an attorney, was found not guilty of entering a controlled area on game lands.

Russell said there was no precedent yet that flying a drone over private property constituted trespassing on the part of the person flying the drone.

Sowers had been cited by Greg Graham, a Game Commission wildlife conservation officer, after 5- to 6-minute video that Sowers took of the drone flying over the off-limits propagation area at Middle Creek was posted on YouTube.

The video was shown at the fairly lengthy court hearing. It was later removed from YouTube after LNP posted it on its website.

Sowers’ attorney disputed the Game Commission’s allegation that the drone caused a large flock of resting snow geese to flush.

When Sowers initially posted the drone video on YouTube, he wrote in a prelude that he did not know that drones are prohibited at the wildlife refuge.

Sowers told investigators that he was along Hopeland Road to watch snow geese and flew the drone from there. Only later, when he went to Willow Point at Middle Creek, did he see signs that prohibited the use of drones, he said.

Graham said Wednesday that there would be at least one other person cited for flying at drone at Middle Creek in a separate incident.

“The whole point of all of this is that when you have snow geese in the tens of thousands at a stopover location to rest and feed, and they have 3,000 miles yet to get to reach the Arctic Circle, they need to be given the opportunity to rest and feed,” he said.

“This was pursued strictly as a violation of the disturbance of wildlife.”

Graham said he has investigated a complaint of a drone flying over and spooking a herd of deer at Middle Creek in November.

And he worries that drones could flush nesting songbirds from ground nests because they see the silhouette of the craft and think it is a predator.

Alarmed at the spate of drone incidents at Middle Creek, the Game Commission board of commissioners voted unanimously in April on a preliminary approval to ban the flying of unmanned aerial vehicles over lands or waters designated as state game lands.

In addition to protecting wildlife, the commissioners said the ban also would ensure that drones aren’t used to interfere with hunting and trapping on game lands. In some incidents in the United States, anti-hunting groups have used drones to disrupt hunting.

The measure approved in April does not become final unless approved by the commissioners at their July meeting.