[froj]

I used to work with small fixed wing drones [1] and had birds of prey remove the battery pack from the aircraft while in flight. I always wondered whether they knew or if they just instinctively went for the "head" of the plane and got lucky that the battery was right there.

There were also reports from customers in Australia where eagles would just shred the drone to pieces almost every flight. Putting big googly eyes stickers on the wings seemed to help to some degree.

[1] https://www.sensefly.com/

Edit: Found the blog post about the eagles in Australia https://www.sensefly.com/blog/bird-drone-attacks-avoid-threa...

[csomar]

Birds of prey are territorial. That drone looks like them and so it's not welcome. They probably messed with it a bit and found that removing the battery kills it. Birds are generally pretty smart, some are self-aware and have high level of intelligence and awareness.

[lucb1e]

> I always wondered whether they knew

Surely you don't mean that they'd have an understanding what the function of a battery is, so I'm not quite sure what you mean?

[tbabb]

They might not know how it works, but they might have learned that it's the part to pull on to make the drone "die".

[brokenmachine]

It's probably just the easiest part to grab with a beak.