WATCH – A red-tailed hawk just took down a police drone in Denver

In a state where squirrels start wildfires and marmots have OnlyFans pages, Colorado’s wildlife has officially added a new flex to the résumé: taking down law enforcement aircraft.

An Arvada police drone was investigating a condemned shed when a red-tailed hawk decided that the airspace above Arvada belonged to exactly one species, and it wasn’t the one with propellers. Video released by the Arvada Police Department shows the encounter from both the bodycam on the ground and the drone’s own camera. From the drone’s perspective, it’s a clear sky, a calm day, and then — in a single frame — nothing but hawk wing filling the entire screen like the jump scare in a horror movie.

The hawk slammed into the drone, knocked it out of the sky and flew away completely uninjured, because of course it did. The drone, part of Arvada’s Drone First Responder unit, did exactly what it was designed to do: It deployed its emergency parachute and floated gently into the top of a very tall tree. The Arvada Fire Department was then called in to retrieve it — meaning an entire fire crew responded to a tree rescue for a robot that lost a fight to a bird.

Damage report: a couple of propellers and a new parachute. The drone is already back in service. The hawk has not been charged.

“With thousands of red-tailed hawks in Colorado and millions across the United States, occasional encounters like this are simply part of operating outdoors,” the department wrote on X, with the kind of calm professionalism that can only come from a police department that just watched one of its aircraft get bodied by a bird. “Fortunately, this one ended well for everyone involved, including the hawk. Huge thanks to Arvada Fire for helping us retrieve it from the top of a very tall tree!”

How do Drone First Responder safety systems work? Here’s a real-world example.

One of our Drone First Responder aircraft recently had an unexpected encounter with one of Colorado’s most common birds of prey, a red-tailed hawk.

The hawk swooped in and knocked the drone out of… pic.twitter.com/7mcBIbufZK

— Arvada Police (@ArvadaPolice) July 29, 2026