Pricing

Coordinated Animal Search

Searches outside our local area are a fundamentally different service from our in-town deployments. Rather than a single visit, a remote search is an overnight operation built around two 3-hour flight blocks — one at sunset and one at sunrise the following morning — to take advantage of the hours when animals are most active and thermal conditions are best. See the full Description of Service below for how this works and why it’s structured this way.

Because these searches fall outside our standard area, each one requires a custom quote to account for travel, lodging, per-diem, and other logistics that vary by region, season, and local events. Please contact us for an estimate.

For the sake of transparency, see the example below. Your quote may be different than the sample below:

One Time Charges

Daily Charges (each day we remain on-site)

Description of Service

Because remote searches can’t be completed in a single trip, our out-of-area service is structured as two search segments at dusk and dawn — the windows where animal behavior and thermal imaging converge. Dogs are most active around sunrise and sunset, and sunrise in particular offers optimal thermal conditions, when the ground has cooled overnight and a warm body stands out most sharply against it. We don’t fly during the heat of the day, when the thermal camera loses its effectiveness against sun-warmed surroundings, and we don’t fly in the dead of night either — like other non-nocturnal animals, dogs tend to hunker down after dark and move again at dawn and dusk.

We begin at sunset and fly for a minimum of 3 hours. If your pet isn’t located that evening, we resume at sunrise for another minimum of 3 hours, guaranteeing at least 6 hours of total flight time across the two segments. At the pilot’s discretion, either segment may be extended beyond the minimum when conditions and the search warrant it.

This overnight structure also serves a practical purpose: if trapping becomes necessary, it gives a wary or frightened animal the hours of darkness it often needs to approach and enter a trap on its own.

Beyond flight time, each day of service also covers the full scope of operational work — planning, ground-operation support, and setting up or relocating traps, cameras, and other equipment.

Should trapping be required beyond the scheduled search window, an additional on-site day is required. Unlike our local service, we can’t return to Austin and drive back to collect traps and supporting equipment (such as game cameras placed across different areas) — and because there’s no way to predict exactly when an animal will enter a trap, that recovery work necessitates staying on-site an additional day.