I watched a doco a while back about a bloke named Damien Mander, who was ex-SAS and served in Afghanistan/Iraq, and was now living in South Africa training wardens to protect the elephants and rhinos. He said that the one tool he wished he had access to was predator UAVs like the ones they had in Afghanistan, because the amount of ground it could cover in one flight was huge compared to troops on-foot (or even in ground based vehicles). He had hooked up with a Melbourne based aviation engineer to design a UAV themselves, with thermo imaging equipment etc. The problem for me was that it was essentially a radio controlled plane, complete with the buzzing sound of the little nitro engine. Seemed like an easy target for a poacher to just shoot it out of the sky.
I really hope Google are putting a predator style UAV in this guys hands.
The issue with louder low flying drones is not the risk of being shot down the problem is alerting the target. But in a anti-poacher situation this may be less of an issue than in a armed conflict.
In a way, the most effective use of this money would be to alert the target well in advance, in fact, before they even go hunting is best. Spend the bulk of the money on advertising the use of these drones, produce a couple of "hits" for the technology (even if the hits are, shall we say, lightly staged), and you will probably get better results that simply pouring all the money into actual drones.
You can't skip that step or the deception will be found out, but you sure could magnify your investment.
I really hope Google are putting a predator style UAV in this guys hands.