WASHINGTON — The National Park Service is taking steps to ban drones from 84 million acres of public lands and waterways, saying the unmanned aircraft annoy visitors, harass wildlife, and threaten safety.
Jonathan Jarvis, the park service’s director, told the Associated Press he doesn’t want drones flushing birds from their nests, hovering over rock climbers as they cling to the sides of cliffs, or buzzing across the face of Mount Rushmore.
Jarvis said he would sign a policy memorandum Friday directing superintendents of the service’s 401 parks to write rules prohibiting the launching, landing, or operation of unmanned aircraft in their parks.
Two large national parks, Grand Canyon in Arizona and Zion in Utah, have already changed their rules to ban drones. Some other parks have interpreted existing regulations to permit them to ban drone flights, but Jarvis said each park must change its ‘‘compendium’’ — a set of regulations unique to that park — if a ban is to be enforceable.
At Yosemite National Park in California, where officials announced last month they would adopt a policy prohibiting drone flights, hobbyists have been using unmanned aircraft to film the park’s famous waterfalls and capture close-up shots of climbers on its granite cliffs. Zion officials were spurred to take action after an incident in which an unmanned aircraft was seen harassing bighorn sheep and causing young ones to become separated from their herd.
‘‘Imagine you’re a big wall climber in Yosemite working on a four-day climb up El Capitan, and you’re hanging off a bolt ready to make a [difficult] move, and an unmanned aircraft flies up beside you and is hovering a few feet from your head with its GoPro camera running,’’ Jarvis said in an interview. ‘‘Think about what that does to your experience and your safety.’’
Some drone operators have complained that a ban favors some park users over others.