Canines have a nose for conservation

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Statesman Journal

By Beth Casper

WREN -- Chilko gets the order, whispered in her ear. "Go find the turtle." She puts her nose to the ground and trots into the long grass. She stops, jerks to the side and lifts her nose above the Willamette Valley's purple and pink wildflowers, catching a whiff of something undetectable to even the most sensitive human.

Then, she gallops in a circle and takes off across a grassy road, stops suddenly and sits.

Next to the turtle.

In a mere two minutes, this Belgian sheepdog tracked down the turtle, a football-sized red-eared slider that had traveled more than 145 feet in 10 minutes.

It would have taken Chilko's owner, Dave Vesely, at least four times as long to find the camouflaged reptile. If he found it at all.

It's the reason Chilko and other dogs nationwide are moving beyond their roles as man's best friend and officers' criminal-catching sidekick to biologists' new research partners.

By harnessing the power of the canine nose, scientists are using dogs to find mammal scat, reptiles and plants -- a strategy that has proved to be many times more effective and efficient than humans working alone.

Vesely, a Corvallis biologist, is launching Oregon into this burgeoning field of conservation dog work. His goal: To help the state's rare Western pond turtle and endangered Kincaid's lupine in the Mid-Willamette Valley.

Although he likely is the only researcher in Oregon to take on the task, he has several other research projects from across the country on which to model his training and compare his success.

It's in the nose

Dogs "see" the world through their noses.

"You can train dogs to find (carpenter) nails -- even a certain type of nail," said Alice Whitelaw of the Working Dogs for Conservation Foundation in Montana. "You wouldn't think ivory or gem stones have a scent, but they do. ... We see the world through our eyes, and the dogs see their world through their nose."

Since realizing the incredible sensitivity of dogs' noses, people have employed them as drug and bomb sniffers at airports, schools and government buildings. Police dogs also track down bodies and criminals.

But the scientific world still largely is dog-free.

Biologists tend to survey for species themselves or trap animals to take blood samples. Recent studies in peer-reviewed journals show that dogs find more species in less time than trained biologists do. Plus, scientists can use the scat found by dogs to get answers to many questions about species -- from diet to DNA.

Dogs also show less bias, Whitelaw said. Trapping animals tends to draw males -- who are more bold -- but dogs detect scat from all members of the population. And they can be trained to find specific species or even individuals.

"Dogs have an amazing ability to discriminate," Whitelaw said. "They can tell different species and individuals within the same species. This is bear A and this is bear C. That is the level of discrimination when dogs are doing detection work."

In Nevada, dogs are being used to find the federally endangered desert tortoise. Mary Cablk's research in 2004 showed that dogs found nine out of every 10 tortoises, some as far away as 162 feet. Last fall, her studies showed that dogs were able to find the same number of tortoises as trained human surveyors but in one-third of the time.

This fall, the dogs will be used to find hatchlings.

"This is the size of tortoise that people can't find," Cablk said. "We don't know anything about baby tortoises ... To be able to learn about them, we need to be able to locate them."

Earning sea legs

Locating and studying sea creatures has been even more difficult for researchers, who have limited access to the underwater world. But it turns out that dogs can be trained to help in the ocean just as they work with researchers on land.

Rosalind Rolland, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium, told her canine assistant Fargo to "Find it!" from the bow of a 21-foot boat. The Rottweiler did as he was told and located the feces of the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

"It's all about learning to interpret the signals of the dog," she said. "When they sense the sample you are after, there is a change of behavior. They get very excited; the ears go forward. They wag their tails and get more and more animated."

On average, dogs are four times as effective as humans in finding whale feces on the water, Rolland found. In fact, whale feces were detected from a little more than one nautical mile away by a dog.

Her results will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management.

Finding as many samples of whale scat -- which sinks an hour after defecation -- is essential for her to understand why there are only 350 North Atlantic right whales in the world.

"A lot of these animals -- on land or in water -- are incredibly elusive," Rolland said. "It is very difficult to get any information about population, physiology, genetics or anything else. An animal like a right whale you can't capture. This is giving us insights we've never had before on these endangered species. There is no other way to study them, and we are getting a tremendous base of knowledge."

Rolland is working on five right whale studies funded by the National Marine Fisheries Service -- research that she says has been "revolutionized" by dogs.

Training to track

Rolland's research assistant, Fargo, flies to the New England Aquarium every summer from Barbara Davenport's training grounds in Gig Harbor, Wash.

Davenport has been training dogs to find the scat of everything from bats and bears to cougars and lynx since 1997, when she was approached by researchers at the University of Washington.

As a nonscientist, her approach is different from that of Whitelaw, of the Montana-based conservation dog foundation. Davenport's background is in training narcotics dogs for the state department of corrections, work she still does.

The type of dog -- high-energy and toy-centric -- is the same for both groups, though.

"We do not take a personal pet to train to do the work," said Davenport, the owner of Packleader Dog Training. "Mostly dogs come to us from humane societies or animal control. They are unadoptable to the general public; they are such high drive, they are annoying to live with."

The Willamette Humane Society, for example, sent two dogs last fall to Washington to try out for conservation survey work, said B.J. Andersen, the kennel manager.

The dogs are trained to channel their drive and energy into a toy that becomes a reward for their work, Davenport said.

Davenport's program, Packleader, has put more than 50 dogs in the field with researchers. The dogs are trained by Davenport and leased to researchers for at least $1,500 a month. The researcher also is trained by Davenport to handle the dog and read the canine's signals -- at about $1,500 per week for at least two weeks.

The price for a conservation dog depends on the researcher's needs. A dog that has to find the scat of one species among seven will cost more because of the highly specialized training. It's less expensive for a dog needed to simply find every piece of poop in a plot.

Davenport does multiple tests on the dog to determine its ability and resolve.

"Some dogs don't like to break brush," she said. "So put him in the desert but don't put him in a national forest around Salem. ... We have to have an intimate knowledge of the dogs -- the good things and his weaknesses."

Even highly motivated dogs have off days and difficult assignments.

"We needed a dog to find bobcat scat," Davenport said about a past research project. "He was totally reliable on everything else, but on bobcat, he would roll in it and become a dog."

Willamette workers

Here in the Willamette Valley, Vesely of Corvallis is working to train his three Belgian sheepdogs to join the conservation field.

Vesely is a consulting wildlife ecologist who has worked for federal and state agencies and watershed councils in the area.

About five years ago, Vesely was trying to find the underground nests of the rare Western pond turtle at a site near the Luckiamute River.

"We were doing all of this by walking really slowly and looking for them visually," he said. "It is just really difficult work."

At the same time, Vesely had been training Chilko to track for dog competitions.

He knew her nose was better than his eyes.

"I had the fundamentals on how to get a dog to track," he said. "But I had to think about it carefully to see how to get her focused on training. It was really just a lot of trial and error."

Vesely taught Chilko to track his red-eared slider, an invasive turtle that he owns by permit through the state wildlife agency.

Then he started training Chilko with water from the turtle's aquarium. Chilko was rewarded with praise for every "find."

But he also needed a system in which Chilko learned not to simply follow Vesely footsteps -- and scent -- to the goal.

Vesely designed what he calls "scent bombs" -- he drains the contents of a chicken egg through a small hole and fills up the egg with the turtle-scented water. He seals it with a small piece of duct tape and them lobs them into fields where they splat, oozing the smell of turtle into the air.

"This has been a really big step," he said. "It just seems like every year I get more sophisticated in training Chilko."

In late May and June, Vesely and Chilko logged many hours surveying for Western pond turtle nests in Wren, a small town outside of Philomath in the Mid-Willamette Valley.

Their work supports a larger strategy of conserving habitat for dozens of species on private land along Marys River.

Researchers know a population of Western pond turtles lives there, but they don't know where they nest. If nesting sites are found, they can be protected and used to boost the overall population.

The Western pond turtle population in Oregon has far more older reptiles than young ones, pointing to an inevitable future: extinction. The hatchlings fall victim to bullfrogs and bass or habitat loss because of their particular nesting needs.

As ironic as it seems, dogs may help the struggling turtle populations.

"He's really onto something," said biologist Josh Cerra with David Evans and Associates, the consultant for the project. "These dogs have a high ability to find the needle in the haystack. ... When we are working with limited funds, this is a potential solution. It's a new era in survey work."

After turtle-nesting season, Chilko and Rogue, 2, will be trained to find rare prairie plants, such as the endangered Kincaid's lupine, which is the lifeblood of Fender's blue butterflies.

"I just went and bought lobelias at the garden store," Vesely said. "It all starts with reinforcing natural behavior. Put down a potted plant in front of a dog. The dog explores it or sniffs it."

Vesely uses a device that makes a clicking noise and gives the dog a treat every time it sniffs the target plant.

After a while, he makes the task more difficult by introducing another species and then doesn't offer a treat when the new plant is sniffed.

Chilko, 5, is the tracking star of Vesely's trio of dogs. But like the right whale and desert tortoise researchers, Vesely plans to test her abilities for the record and write a paper for a wildlife-management journal.

"I need to demonstrate how reliable Chilko is at this," he said. "I know she can find turtles on land. Where she has covered a site, no human volunteer has come by and found a nest she hasn't."

If the results are as good as those presented in several scientific journals, Oregon conservationists might hire Vesely and his dogs.

"At this point, we are going to the Coburg Hills areas and looking for Kincaid's lupine and spurred lupine," said Greg Fitzpatrick, the Willamette Valley steward ecologist for the Nature Conservancy. "It takes a lot of effort to walk and hike many, many miles to look for these plants. We are going to spend probably as much as two weeks out in the field going to different sites looking for these plants. Each site might take a day or day and a half to work it."

"If a dog could go out, it could cut the time in half or more," he said. "In relation to Fender's blue butterfly, we have to look for eggs to see if Fender's visits these sites. If the dog could smell the eggs or the butterfly, that would be great. It would be very useful."