North Country man finds missing Adirondack pets using thermal drone

Retired investigator started photographing wildlife with drones — then switched to locating more than 40 lost dogs

By H. Rose Schneider, Times Union Staff Writer

On Christmas Eve, Chad Tavernia got a call from a woman about her golden retriever. Its leash had snapped, and the dog had run off, dragging 20 feet of leash with it. Eight inches of snow had fallen, burying any prints.

Within 10 minutes, Tavernia found the dog about 1,000 feet behind the woman’s home, stuck in the snow.

“Within a couple of days, she would have been dead,” Tavernia said of the dog.

It’s not uncommon for Tavernia to find a dog stranded like this. In October, a 120-pound Rottweiler managed to break its metal chain and run away, only to get tangled in a thicket of cedar trees. In May, he tracked a dog to an 8-foot ledge off Catamount Mountain in St. Lawrence County.

Tavernia’s method of finding lost pets can be seen in photos and videos he shares on the Facebook page for his business, North Country Drone Search & Recovery. In thermal images taken by a drone overhead, a lost dog stands out as a red-and-yellow dot in a sea of blue and green. Tavernia said he has about a 40 percent success rate. That jumps up to 90 percent if he can get a drone over the area where the pet ran off.

“I literally could find a squirrel if you wanted me to,” he said.

In one video, Tavernia zooms in on Finn, a 5-year-old beagle-coonhound mix, as he coaches Kimberly Labarr and her sister Danielle Brown.

“Have her walk this way slowly,” he says to Labarr. “I think he sees her.”

Finn had broken through his electric fence in West Chazy on Jan. 29. Brown, 43, couldn’t find him. After a sleepless night, she messaged her sister, who went out to look while Brown was at work.

“It’s 15 hours at that point, and it’s cold and windy and there’s a lot of woods,” Labarr, 34, said.

She messaged Brown that she was calling “the drone guy.”

Work began as a hobby

Tavernia, 44, of Malone, picked up flying drones as a hobby in 2016. In December 2023, the retired State Police investigator bought a set of thermal imaging drones.

“I knew there was potential,” he said. “I knew there would be some kind of use to find animals in the woods with a drone.”

Tavernia started sharing drone footage of wildlife online. Then in January of last year, a woman from Vermont who’d seen the images reached out. Her dog had been missing for six days. Tavernia found it within an hour and shared the story on Facebook. A couple of days later, a man from Dannemora reached out about his 4-month-old German shepherd, which had been missing for four days. Tavernia found it quickly. More and more messages and calls came in after that.

Thermal drones have been used to find leaks in construction, inspect solar fields and are being floated by hunters as a way to find wounded game (bills allowing this have been introduced in both New York and Pennsylvania). Their role in finding lost pets is one other use that is quickly gaining attention.

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In a little over a year, Tavernia has found 42 lost dogs and 11 other animals, including horses and cattle. He charges a fee, usually $350, but it can vary based on how far he’s driving. He’s traveled as far west as Syracuse, as far east as Vermont and even as far south as Albany (while he’s been asked, he can’t fly his drone into Canada — certain areas in Adirondack Park don’t allow drones to be launched there either, but they can fly over them). He has no plans to expand his business. If needed, he’ll direct clients to other drone services in the region.

“I don’t have any grandiose visions of hiring additional people,” he said. “The calls I’m able to go out and handle, I will do my best.”

Tavernia does find parallels to his previous work as an investigator. He approaches both jobs systematically, first asking about the dog to ascertain how far it could have traveled and then pulling up the area where it ran off on Google Maps.

“It really just comes down to methodically searching all of the wooded areas within a couple miles,” he said.

Sometimes it can take five hours to find a dog a mile-and-a-half away.

“There’s no easy way to do it,” he said.

Tavernia found Finn with his drone in about two hours, but the disoriented dog ran off as Labarr approached. Brown took over, taking her dog Winston with her.

Labarr had seen some of Tavernia’s posts on Facebook, but Brown had never heard of him. She was skeptical, especially as she felt like his instructions were leading her in circles. She didn’t realize until later that Finn was going in circles, and she was following.

Winston, a 9-year-old Plott hound, was also following Finn’s trail. He stopped to sniff a depression in the grass where something had laid down. Then Brown looked over and saw Finn.

“Finn, Finn, look it’s Winston!” she called out.

Tail wagging, Finn bolted over to his fellow hound.

Katherine McPherson, 44, of Burke had also never heard of the business before. Her 10-month-old retriever-bully mix, Aurora, had gone missing on Jan. 10 after the cold drained the battery in her boundary collar. Her boyfriend, Paul Conto, had gone to school with Tavernia, but it was her mother who told her, “Call this Chad guy, he’s got a drone.”

Temperatures were in the single digits, and snow drifts reached Conto’s waist at times as Tavernia guided him through two-and-a-half cornfields and into the woods before he found Aurora about a mile-and-a-half from their home.

“It was a relief because I thought I was never going to see her again,” McPherson said.

While he stresses drones are not a “magic bullet,” there aren’t many other methods to finding a lost pet — especially in the North Country — outside of setting up a trap or just physically searching. For some, a drone search is a last-ditch effort. In some cases, it saves the dog’s life.

“Just to see drones used in a positive way and give people a little reassurance that not everyone using a drone is using it to infringe on our privacy,” Labarr said. “This is a fantastic thing that Chad is offering to this area.”