A NATO fighter jet launched from Siauliai Air Base on Sunday, Vilnius International Airport stopped arrivals and departures, and phones across the Lithuanian capital told people to get to a shelter. The radar contact behind all of it was a flock of birds.

Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre issued a yellow air alert at 12:59 p.m. local time. The jet, flown by the Italian air force detachment currently running NATO’s Baltic air policing mission, made a visual identification. The alert came down and the airport reopened within 38 minutes.

Vilnius has run this drill before. On May 20 DroneXL reported a red alert that emptied the Seimas, moved the president to a safe location and put two NATO fighters over Lithuania and Latvia, chasing a drone that was never found. Sunday’s version resolved faster, and with feathers.

Radar Cannot Separate a Bird Flock From a Small Drone on Its Own

Dense bird flocks and small drones can leave similar traces on air defence radar, which is why the contact needed a second look. Lithuania’s crisis centre said marks left by birds and drones can be similar on initial readings, so it ordered an additional check.

The alert covered Vilnius city, Vilnius district and the Trakai and Elektrenai districts, and it was lifted at 1:37 p.m., Xinhua reported, citing public broadcaster LRT. Vilmantas Vitkauskas, who heads the crisis centre, told LRT radio that a large concentration of birds moving in one direction can register on radar as a drone-like object. Flights paid for the ambiguity anyway: two inbound aircraft diverted to Kaunas and a service out of Warsaw turned back mid-route.

Thirty-eight minutes is a fast resolution for a problem that has no sensor-only answer. The jet did the work the radar could not.

Poland Scrambled Helicopters Over the Same Mistake Eight Days Earlier

Poland ran the same sequence on September 6. Its Armed Forces Operational Command scrambled helicopters after radar showed a possible airspace violation from the direction of Belarus, and Rzeszow airport briefly suspended operations. The cause was a large flock of birds.

Lithuania’s own defence ministry logged the identical outcome in September 2024, when NATO jets were scrambled for an object crossing from Belarus into Latvia and the alert was downgraded to a training run once the birds were identified. This is the argument DroneXL has been making since New Jersey, in the piece tracing Europe’s drone panic back to the mass hysteria of December 2024, when a former Maryland governor reported mystery drones that critics identified as stars. In June, the second “drone” over JFK in a single day turned out to be a red-and-white RC plane.

Lithuania Still Has a Real Drone Problem

The false alarm does not cancel the threat behind it. A Russian-made Gerbera crossed from Belarus and came down in Vilnius County in July 2025, a second reached a military training ground with an explosive device aboard, and parliament then cleared the armed forces to shoot down drones over Lithuania.

Reuters placed Sunday’s alert against military drones straying into the airspace of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the pressure that puts on NATO’s northern border with Russia. German investigators said in August that an employee at Leipzig/Halle airport found a drone carrying an explosive device in the cargo security area, a case DroneXL followed down to the damage on an Antonov’s wing. Vitkauskas said at least 22 smuggling drones have been recorded in Lithuanian airspace in September alone, and a separate radar track crossed toward Kaliningrad at around 4:25 a.m. on Sunday without triggering an alert at all. The Belarusian border sits about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the capital. Nobody in Vilnius has the option of assuming a radar blip is nothing.

DroneXL’s Take

Vilnius got this right, and that is the uncomfortable part. Lithuania treated an ambiguous radar return as hostile until a human being looked at it with his own eyes. The bill came to 38 minutes of stopped traffic, two diverted flights and a fighter’s flight hours.

Given that armed Gerberas have already crossed that border, I’d take that trade every time. The scramble was not the failure. The failure would have been calling it birds from a console and being wrong.

What bothers me is the same physics landing in far more hands. Roughly 1,500 US agencies are expected to certify for counter-drone authority within two years, and the Pentagon task force running that effort named cheap, wide-area detection as the capability it has not solved yet. If NATO air defence radar with a fighter on standby needs a visual ID to tell a bird flock from a Gerbera, my read is that a sheriff’s office with a vendor sensor package and mitigation authority will be wrong more often, faster, and with far less reason to wait.

Watch whether a detection standard travels with the authority as those certifications roll out. Birds have been lighting up air defence radar for as long as air defence radar has existed. What is new is how many people are about to have permission to act on the blip.

Sources: Reuters, Xinhua, Aviation A2Z, Reuters via The Canberra Times, Lithuanian Ministry of National Defence

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.