LOCAL DRONE PILOT USES HIGH TECH TO FIND LOST ANIMALS.
Trey Larson, a 2010 Plant City High School graduate and Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office Reserve 1 Deputy, is the owner and operator of Florida Game Recovery. He has a high-end drone he doesn’t play with—he uses it for good by recovering pets, livestock, and wounded game. “As a kid, my best friend growing up was my Redbone Coonhound,” Larson said. “His name was Dan. Just like in the book, ‘Where the Red Fern Grows.’ We would go running through the woods every day. I even got a female and named her Ann, just like in the book. When I was 16 years old, Dan, Ann, and our beagle got out and ran away. Six days later, we did recover the beagle and Ann, the female, but we never recovered Dan. Being able to help these pet owners recover their missing pets is personal to me because I lost my dog. We are helping these people now so they don’t suffer the same loss I did as a kid.”
To be legally hired as a drone pilot, Larson had to study for, and pass the Federal Aviation Administration, Part 107 License test. This is a condensed version of the same test airline pilots take. Larson’s drone has a wingspan of 18 inches and weighs seven pounds. The reason it is so heavy is, it is full of high tech equipment. It carries a thermal camera, a wide-angle camera, a first person view (FPV) camera, a spotlight, and a laser range finder. The thermal camera offers multiple color-contrast palettes to make finding things easier. The drone also has GPS and satellite location capabilities.
When he arrives for a job, Larson sets up his gear including a 32-inch monitor to which he hooks his remote controller. With this, the pet owner gets to see everything the drone sees. Using Google Maps, the pet owner shows Larson the areas where the pet may be, so he can drop pins on the map to mark areas to focus on.
To find animals, Larson uses the thermal camera set for white hot imaging. Cool areas show as grey, but an animal’s temperature causes it to glow like a lightbulb in the dark. “The thermal camera is extremely high quality,” Larson said. “It can pick up all the different heat signatures. Animals stand out extremely well. We scan the area looking at each different heat signature. For an animal, we switch over to the 200x zoom camera. It is a 48 megapixel camera, so it can zoom in incredibly far. During the day, even from 400 feet in the air, I can zoom in and see every detail on the animal to differentiate whether it is the missing pet or just another animal on the loose in the area. One of the questions people ask is how do I figure out the animals I locate at night. The drone has an 8,000 lumen spotlight on it. So, whenever we locate an animal with the thermal camera, then we switch over to the zoom camera with the spotlight. From 400 feet in the air we can zoom in and immediately differentiate between the missing pet or somebody else’s pet.”
Once Larson locates the missing animal, he uses the laser range finder. “I point that at the pet and push a button, and it drops a pin in the exact location of the pet,” Larson said. “It coordinates that with Google Maps, and it pulls up a QR code. The pet owner can scan that QR code, and it pulls the exact coordinates of where that animal is sitting. Once we do that, I keep the watchful eye in the sky, while the pet owner looks at their phone and responds to that exact location. I talk to the owner on the phone. I can see the owner approaching, and I can guide them to the animal even if it is moving, so they can recover it.”
Every situation is different, but in some cases, Larson has located a pet in a few minutes. Sometimes it can take hours. Or if the pet has moved out of the search area or has been picked up, not at all. To date, he has a 70 percent recovery success rate. In addition to dogs and cats, he has located a lost donkey and a herd of goats gone missing. “My main focus is the cats and dogs,” Larson commented. “Those are definitely the most important to people, because cats and dogs can be like people’s children. Being able to locate and recover the pet for them is an extremely rewarding process.”
A family in Bartow had been missing their dog for 33 hours. After Larson set up, it took about an hour to locate the dog. He was able to direct owners to the pet and make a successful recovery. In another search on Christmas Day, a widely known Youtuber had spent more than six hours looking for his cat. Within two minutes after getting the drone in the air, Larson spotted the cat two houses away hiding in bushes.
“Trey’s business is amazing and I want to do all I can to spread the word so others know this service exists,” Ansley Peacock said. “We were incredibly lucky that a friend sent me his website, and that he picked up the phone and could respond that evening. I do not think we would have been able to find our dog without his drone. It was impressive to see his operation and the use of the drone technology. We had been able to obtain sightings by spreading the word through Facebook and flyers that we posted throughout town and put in hundreds of mailboxes. By giving him those sighting locations he was able to find her within 90 minutes. And it was in an area where we had searched (a vacant lot on a lake), but she was so far back in the bushes that my husband had to crawl to her location. We would not have found her without him. His technology and ability to use that technology was absolutely amazing.”
More information about Larson’s service can be found at floridapetrecovery on Instagram; Florida Pet Recovery on Facebook, and https://www.floridagamerecovery.com. Drone footage and audio of actual pet recoveries can also been seen on these pages.
