Animatronic Bird Armature (head sold separatly)

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VIDEO: It's astonishing what motivation can achieve when it comes to driving innovation forward. At some point, humans get frustrated enough to go out and invent something truly remarkable, seemingly conjured up from thin air. That's the perception with many 3D printed projects that appear like pure magic, especially when you consider that one brilliant individual is capable of producing something so intricate and lifelike it's almost unnerving. The motivation behind Jonny Poole's project at UK's InnerbreedFX was to create an incredibly lifelike, 3D printed animatronic lure for raptors that need to be briefly captured for research purposes. This process is a lot of work, and there's currently a significant amount of wasted time and frustration involved. Jonny Poole of InnerbreedFX While Poole's project was actually a labor of love, he was motivated to create the animatronic creatures after speaking with raptor specialists who explained the difficulty and frustration in trying to capture raptors for procedures like fitting them with leg bands for tracking purposes. Capturing a raptor for research purposes must be done with the most humane and legal methods possible, but often that means humans have to go to great lengths to figure out how to lure these magnificent birds of prey. The current methods employed by researchers are either making artificial lures or, after obtaining permits, using live animals that cannot be released into the wild. Obviously, when you want to catch a wild animal, you must find its nest. If you don't know this from real-life experience or science class, you've probably picked it up from every sci-fi movie featuring some sort of beast that needs to be captured. In this case, we're just trying to capture unsuspecting raptors for the most positive of reasons and non-invasive procedures so that we can study them further. In staking out the nest, the optimum lure for catching one raptor is in awakening its aggression by using another live raptor to draw it out and then net it, but that's not always easy. The laws are very strict in the United States, and even more rigorous in the United Kingdom. The easiest route for getting a lure out there immediately is, of course, to make something artificial with items featuring plastic lures, scarecrows, and lures with stuffed heads that swivel with controls. Poole wanted to make the entire process easier, and create something more believable all around, using 3D printing and reference from taxidermy forms. The movements that are important are ones that InnerbreedFX captured, such as cocking of the head, opening of the beak, and eventually, they will hope to include more complex spreading of the wings.