DENVER – Rangers protecting the lions, elephants and leopards of Rwanda’s Akagera National Park often patrol on foot, and venture only with difficulty into its swamps to keep an eye on rare birds.
A Denver teen who visited the park in northeast Rwanda last summer had an idea he thought would make the rangers’ job easier. He and a friend would build a drone to donate to Akagera.
Akagera’s rangers “deal with a lot more difficult problems than we do, and with very limited resources,” Max Alger-Meyer said, speaking in a robotics lab at the Denver School of Science and Technology in the northeast neighborhood of Stapleton.
Once home from his trip organized by a Denver-based international development nonprofit, Alger-Meyer applied the lessons he had learned in frugality and ingenuity. He and Nathan Lepore, both 18, made the drone themselves because that was cheaper than simply buying one, and the exercise was a hands-on learning experience. Lepore has been accepted into Stanford’s mechanical engineering program. Alger-Meyer will enter the aeronautical engineering at the University of Colorado next year.
In a telephone interview from his park, Akagera manager Jes Gruner said he was surprised when got an email from Denver. He’d heard before from people who wanted to sell him a drone, but never from anyone who wanted to give him one. Gruner said the donation will be useful for spotting brushfires. In addition, the drone will allow Akagera to do surveys more often of such animals as shoebill storks, endangered birds that inhabit swamps that are difficult for rangers to navigate.
The park now brings in a helicopter for animal counts, “but it’s incredibly expensive. We only do that every two years,” Gruner said. “We don’t have the luxury of playing with money.”
