When I was eight, I remember our train to Mumbai ground to a halt with a great noise. When we started moving again, a good eight hours later, someone pointed out a mangled tail, of all things, hanging from a branch close to the tracks. The train, you see, had apparently hit a wild bison at full speed, and the impact damaged the engine so badly that it had to be towed away for repairs. For a long time, I thought such things only happened in places like rural India, but I learned a few years ago that wildlife and infrastructure do not mix anywhere on the planet. The FAA estimates that wildlife strikes have cost U.
civil aviation about $272 million a year on average between 1990 and 2025. In France, the rail operator SNCF says wandering animals affect more than 8,000 trains across the country each year and are among its five leading causes of delays. In Brittany, 120 trains hit animals in 2023 alone, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delays.
Reading about all that damage, to both infrastructure and animals, inspired Sara Nozkova (pictured above on the left) to develop a wildlife-deterrent system that works differently from the sirens, lights, fences, falcons, and culling traditionally used to keep animals away from roads, train tracks, airports, and other infrastructure. "I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent," she told TechCrunch.
After spending 13 years working in transportation and autonomous vehicles, Nozkova had learned how quickly the systems we build to navigate roads and other controlled environments fail once nature enters the equation. "We have taught machines to be brilliant, but only inside the environments we engineered for them," she said. "Cities, factory lines, warehouses. Fixed geometry, known objects. Stepping outside into nature, I saw firsthand how the same machines quickly go blind. Because nature is complex and always alive.