Hawk attacks drone, knocking it out of the sky

It seems hawks aren't big fans of sharing their airspace. 

Christopher Schmidt, a computer programmer, was flying his Phantom FC40 drone over Magazine Park in Cambridge, Mass. on Oct. 8. He bought it six months ago and takes it out several times a week. On this particular day, Mr. Schmidt had attached a GoPro Hero 3+ Black to take a video of the trees changing color. 

As he was operating the drone, Schmidt noticed a hawk was circling, and he tried to move the drone out of the way. Then the hawk suddenly attacked the drone from above. Schmidt captured everything and uploaded the video to YouTube. The video already has 300,000 views.

"I first thought, 'That will be an interesting shot,' and then, as he hit the [drone], I thought 'kill the motors so I don't hurt the hawk!' " Schmidt says in an e-mail to The Monitor.  He says turning the motor off is what caused the drone to fall out of the sky. 

"In the end, as far as I can tell, the hawk was uninjured," he says. "I saw him later, perched in a tree, without problems." For those wondering, the drone only suffered minimal damage.

In another bird-attacks-drone video posted last December, a flock of birds dive-bombed a drone. In the video, uploaded to YouTube by Buddhanz1, birds can be seen speeding by the drone. The camera then begins shaking, which Buddhanz1 said was birds dive-bombing the DJI Phantom. This bird attack was also captured using a GoPro Hero 3+ Black. 

"I must have annoyed a group of birds, they teamed up [and] started dive bombing my radio controlled phantom drone from all directions. I think they knocked the battery connector loose ... [and I] had a rough landing," the user wrote.