Reanimated corpses tend to be the stuff of fictional Halloween-y dread: horror stories about zombies and other sundry revenants, staggering about to usher in one brand of apocalypse or another.

As it happens, the dead can (sort of) come “alive” again for the good of the actual flesh-and-blood living. Researchers at New Mexico Tech (NMT), in the USA are experimenting with converting taxidermied birds into drones in the service of wildlife science and conservation.

Dr. Mustafa Hassanalian and his team at the NMT Autonomous Flight & Aquatic Systems Laboratory work with drones and related robots in many forms and applications – and, lately, have been rigging them into stuffed-and-mounted birds. The idea is to create the sort of hyper-realistic mimics that might be able to record up-close-and-personal animal behaviour without spooking – or provoking – the subjects.

“Spooking,” because noisy traditional drones can unnerve or otherwise alert wild critters; and “provoking” on account sometimes, for example, birds of prey – such as golden and wedge-tailed eagles – respond to these flying robots in a decidedly unfriendly manner.

By-the-books biomimicry and biometrics are one thing: Reanimating an expired bird via the sculling feet of a duck or the neurotically scanning action of a rock dove is another. But dressing up one of these state-of-the-art machines in the literal feathers of an avian stiff may camouflage them in the midst of still-kicking avifauna better than any artificial costume might.

(Lest one fret about the idea of living birds being snuffed out to produce these wing-beating and sculling robots, Prof. Hassanalian’s lab procures its raw organic material, so to speak, from creatures that died of natural causes and via certified taxidermists.)

An idea Hassanalian started scheming more than a decade ago, these plumaged “biomimicry drones,” as he calls them, have thus far included pheasants, mallard ducks, and pigeons (as well as a sort of one-off turkey). They collectively encompass a robotic spectrum of flapping, paddling, and head-swivelling – one end goal being, as USA Today reported this past November, “a bird robot that can fly, swim, and perch.”

Such work could go beyond simply monitoring the robot-mimicked species in question: Many aspects of the bird-roamed environment might be better assessed. “One of our major goals is to expand the application of these drones for environmental conservation and monitoring, including the use of swimming bird drones for water quality analysis in remote and protected wetlands,” Hassanalian told IFL Science. “We are working on larger bird models to monitor broader ecosystems and even developing drones with the ability to dive and resurface.”

Another possible use for the robotics, as Hassanalian told the Albuquerque, New Mexico news station KOB 4, is spooking birds away from airport runways with aerial bird-of-prey robots.

The next step is actually debuting the taxidermied drones – extensively tested in laboratory and other controlled settings – out in the field, among living, breathing birdlife.

If all this calls to mind the whole tongue-in-cheek “birds aren’t real” thing – a fake conspiracy theory about the government spying on citizenry via bird drones – Hassanalian is quick to stress that surveillance is not among the applications these “zombies” have been designed for.

In the future, the NMT team hopes to expand its taxidermy-robotics to include such animal groups as (climbing) lizards, (slithering) snakes, and (jumping) frogs. And Hassanalian told USA Today their biometric work goes beyond fauna: A “dandelion-inspired” drone design to aid in seed dispersal is also under consideration.