A good entrepreneur thinks of potential markets even while working out technical details. That’s why Donald Ronning of Nashua is interested in wind turbines, cell towers, airports and the Milford Fish Hatchery.

Fish hatchery?

“They’ve got a real osprey problem there,” said Ronning, who recently received a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study ways to use ultraviolet light – invisible to humans but visible to many animals and birds – to scare away wildlife without harming them.

As part of his tests, he has established a UV gun near a open trout pool at the Milford hatchery.

“We typically don’t keep a lot of fish in there – right now there’s probably about 14,000 (rainbow trout),” said Theresa Rogers, superintendent of the state-owned hatchery on North River Road. “It’s like a free lunch
buffet for the osprey and the blue heron. Mink and otter come in, too.”

A light gun that scares off some of these predators would be most welcome, especially if the light won’t bother people.

“We try to make it scary, spooky for them,” said Ronning, during a recent meeting in a small industrial condo near the Nashua airport that is home to his one-man company, Lite Enterprises.

“I’ve also been working with Portland, Maine, mussel farmers. They have a real problem with diving ducks, eider ducks,” he noted.

The idea for UV wildlife deterrence came to Ronning several years ago when he heard somebody talking about the problem that wind farms have because birds and bats are sometimes killed by the spinning blades.

Ronning worked in the semi-conductor industry before “all the jobs went overseas” and has been involved in a number of small tech R&D startups over 20 years in southern New Hampshire. He knew that LEDs have been developed to work in the ultraviolet spectrum – light that has a color “beyond violet,” with wavelengths too small for our eye to perceive – and began wondering if this might lead to a marketable product.

He knew there are plenty of places other wind farms that need a non-lethal way to scare off wildlife. One example sits just on the other side of Bud Way from his office: Nashua airport. Like all airports, it would like an easy way to keep birds away from planes.

The federal government has been studying ways to reduce airplane bird strikes, particularly since the 2009 incident that brought down U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Ronning thinks UV lights on planes to make them more visible might make the difference, judging from slow-motion video of birds interacting with planes.

“In the last instant, they recognize they’re in trouble. You can see them try to (get away),” Ronning said. “If we can increase that reaction time by even half a second – well, a near-miss is still a miss.”

This sounds pretty straightforward: Build a powerful UV flashlight, make it flash whenever you want to scare off wildlife, and profit! What’s so hard?

Plenty, as any entrepreneur can tell you.

“First you’ve got to show that it works. You’re dealing with wild birds: how do you know they weren’t going to fly away anyway?” said Ronning. “You need long-term studies, with statistical analysis … published in a peer-reviewed journal.”

Hence the Milford Fish Hatchery study, which is being overseen in part of Audubon Society. Lite Enterprises needs good data about which birds come to the pond, how often and when, and how much fish they eat, and they need it throughout the year. Then they need equal data about whether this changes in any significant way when the device is running.

It’s a time-consuming and costly process and explains why creating a startup isn’t always as easy as programming a smartphone app.

Ronning notes that there are biological as well as technical questions, notably concern about habituation.

“These birds are pretty intelligent – once they find out that it’s not going to harm them, I wonder if it’s going to work,” said Rogers. “But I sure hope so.”

GraniteGeek appears Mondays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Brooks on Twitter (@granitegeek).

Newsletter