N.Y. drone pilot finds lost puppy missing for 4 days in wilderness (video)

The drone hovered about 300 feet above a snowy forest on the edge of the Adirondacks, beaming back a thermal video image to Chad Tavernia half a mile away.

The video was just indiscriminate blobs of gray and black, like an old film negative, except for the bright white dot glowing in the middle of the drone controller’s screen.

“It’s such a bright white there’s no way it could be anything but an animal,” Tavernia said.

In 45 minutes of scanning the forest from above, the thermal camera had picked up a lot of deer, chipmunks, even birds. But the white dot was too small to be a deer, too big to be a chipmunk. Coyote, maybe? Tavernia wondered.

Or was it the missing puppy Tavernia had been hired to find?

Tavernia switched to the drone’s regular camera to get visual confirmation, but the drone didn’t respond. Power lines overhead interfered with the signal. He would have to recall the drone and fly it back to the exact spot from another direction—and hope the white dot didn’t move in the meantime.

Tavernia is a recently retired New York State police officer, and a newly minted, FAA-certified drone pilot. Last October he hung his digital shingle on Facebook for North Country Drone Search & Rescue, based in Malone. He charges a flat fee of $300 to find lost pets.

Business was slow at first, but after successfully locating a hound dog lost in a Vermont swamp, things began to pick up. On Jan. 28, a 4-month-old German shepherd named Maximo ran away from his home in rural Ellenburg Center.

Maximo’s owner, Ryan Luebbers, searched for four days with no luck. Now he stood next to Tavernia, staring at the at the glowing white dot on the drone controller’s screen, hoping that it was Max.