Police are investigating an incident at Lake Ellesmere that happened over the weekend after a duck hunter allegedly shot down an animal rights activist’s drone.
The drone’s pilot was at the Christchurch Lake with the advocacy group Christchurch Animal Save for the first day of the bird shooting season on Saturday morning.
The pilot said he had seen a duck flapping upside down after being shot, and saw a dog out to retrieve it.
“I thought this would be a good time to put the drone up to capture this. Then, bang! I was looking at the screen and I lost signal. I look up and there’s the drone slowly spiralling down into the lake.”
“Then, bang, another shot. It just dropped like a brick out of the sky,” he added.
A police spokesman said they got a report of a drone being shot at the eastern edge of the lake, around 10.30 am on Saturday.
The pilot told the police he would be flying more drones above the lake and asked them to tell the hunters he would; however, by that time, the hunters had packed up and left.
“After the hunters, we were seeing flocks of geese and swans flying past us, and we were celebrating, because they got to live another day,” the pilot said.
“We just wanted to highlight the other side of it. We saw that it was being celebrated, that duck shooting was coming, and we wanted to tell the other side,” they added.
The pilot hopes to retrieve their $2500 drone from the bottom of the lake.
