The combination of UAV and aerial photography technology expands the mission range of UAV in aerial survey, which is further enhanced by deep learning technology in the ability of intelligent detection. Recently, UAV aerial photography technology has been gradually applied to wildlife protection, which has greatly improved the investigation efficiency. Due to the great difference in characteristics between aerial images and ground images, and the complex background of wildlife living environment, there is no general method that can be directly applied to the detection and statistics of UAV aerial wildlife photography. Firstly, the development of intelligent detection and statistics technology in recent years is reviewed. Then, according to the characteristics of large scene, small target, multi scale and complex background of UAV aerial wildlife photography, the selection and establishment methods of UAV aerial wildlife dataset is introduced, as well as the detection and statistics methods based on deep learning. Finally, the advantages and applicable scenes of these methods are summarized, and the improvement direction is given.