Mavic 3 Thermal (M3T)

Hmm, a Mavic 3E or something should work. You just won't want to do big jobs with it. https://enterprise.dji.com/mobile/mavic-3-enterprise

The mavic 3Es love big jobs. Just keep throwing batteries at it and have 2 chargers going 🦾

I just took part in flying drones to map infrastructure and home damage in a bunch of super remote villages in South West Alaska. The whole area was smacked by the remnants of Typhoon Halong, huge storm surge up the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta and 100mph winds. We were using Mavic 3T’s. Our primary job is flying on wildfires, and these are great for that mission. They worked well for this as well. I’ll say the biggest bottleneck in our workflow was sending the imagery to the cloud for processing. We’re going to be looking at how RTK might increase processing speed in the future, and possibly do it local, rather than have to upload everything. Starlink is great, but it can only do so much. Near the end of our mission we started switching over to some service, don’t have my field notes on me and I can’t remember the name, that was taking full motion video and creating orthos from video shot at a 45° angle from about 50-100’. That was only my last couple days on the incident, so I’m not sure what the actual resulting product turned out like. Anker makes some really nice 25000mah batteries. They were handing those things out like candy. I was using them to run a Starlink mini and to keep my remote and phone charged. Super handy.

I have been using my Mavic 3T / Mavic 3 Enterprise Thermal for dog search and rescue and I do wish the thermal camera was a little bit better, but it does work. Though I just went down a rabbit hole and found the next models up with a \~20% price bump still have the same 0.3MP resolution so I am rethinking its probably not so bad.

Mavic 3T is great but it might get banned for political reasons in a few weeks. Another competitive thermal drone is made by Autel, also made in China and might get banned. It is fairly common to crash a drone and need repairs, these bans will effectively make repairs impossible. Every other thermal capable drone is half as good or three times as expensive and still not that good. It's a terrible time in the US to buy a good drone. I've seen folks convince themselves that they'll never crash their drone, then they step on it in the parking lot.

You will be far better equipped getting a Mavic 3 thermal and a separate handheld device. Detachable payloads sit with things like the 300/350/400 series and you're looking at about 20 grand

I have some experience with this counting flocks of geese and ducks, but I used my Matrice M30 which has a 405mm optical zoom allowing me to stay around 300 feet away where it doesn't bother the birds. Anything closer than 200 feet was too intrusive and shooting from an angle was better than directly overhead - less of a threat. It sounds like a Mavic 3T might meet your needs, but the tele camera on it is a 162mm equivalent so you'll have to be closer. It's in your price range I believe.