The star of the show is Camas, a glossy black, seven-year-old German shepherd with paired tawny spots above her eyelids and on her cheeks and forechest. Taught by her coach and handler, Alice Whitelaw, Camas has learned her craft well, and for those who might mistake the purpose of this performance, she wears a red vest inscribed with the words, "Don’t pet me, I’m working."
The stage is a triangular section in the Centennial Mountains, a remote range that sits astride the Montana-Idaho border in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Camas’s job this crisp September morning is to detect the scats (fecal deposits) of black bear, grizzly bear, wolf, and mountain lion. Alice’s job is to keep Camas on task—fairly easy with a dog who will work her heart out for a few minutes of play with her prized toy, a tennis ball tethered on a short, stout rope.
There are four of us—Camas and Alice, biologist Jon Beckmann, and me. We’re bushwhacking extremely steep terrain at 7,000 feet through deadfall strewn across the way like jackstraws. Breathing hard, I struggle to maintain my balance and not become impaled on one of many nasty snags bristling from the downed timbers, while the dog nimbly negotiates the maze. "So much easier with four legs!" I gasp.
Camas carries a Global Positioning System (GPS) device tucked in a pouch on her vest. Every 20 seconds, the GPS unit registers her position, allowing Alice to plot the dog’s meandering travel route and to calculate how much ground she covers. For every mile we hike, the dog trots two or three. To warn neighborhood bears of our whereabouts, a bell attached to the underside of her collar tinkles constantly.
Just then, Camas stops dead in her tracks, pinpoints something on the ground, sits, pricks up her ears, and stares directly at Alice. "What did you find?" asks Alice, as she walks to the spot that Camas has "alerted" on.
Sure enough, it’s animal scat. Probably bear. "Good girl!" Alice shouts. She pulls the tennis ball from a pocket on her daypack and tosses it into the air. Camas snares it on the fly.
While Alice and Camas play tug-of-war, Jon pulls a data sheet from his daypack and kneels to inspect the scat. He notes date, time, names of handler and dog, GPS reading, wind direction and speed, elevation, orientation of the slope, and habitat type. He assigns the sample an identification number, names the animal species, if known, comments on the quality of the sample, and enters other pertinent data, such as presence of livestock, roads or fences, or evidence of human presence. Then he drops the scat sample into a plastic bag, sprinkles in some silica beads to remove moisture, labels the bag, and seals it. Later, Jon will store the collected samples at minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit before sending them, packed in dry ice, to a lab in Colorado for endocrine and DNA analyses.
Data collection finished, Jon stands. It’s time for dog and handler to go back to work. "Drop it," Alice commands, and Camas instantly releases the ball, which is pocketed until her next find.
Commands are simple and direct. "Find it," Alice says, pointing upslope, and Camas springs into action. If the dog lingers too long over an odor, Alice calls, "Leave it!"
Less than 100 yards from her last scat discovery, Camas alerts on the second of 16 scat samples she will find during roughly five hours in the field. Out pops the ball to a chorus of "Good girls." Camas pounces, retrieves the ball, and this time, offers it to me for tug-of-war. Jon kneels over the scat sample.
Jon Beckmann is the principal investigator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Carnivore Connectivity Project, an attempt to determine population densities and movement patterns of four species of megafauna—mountain lions, wolves, black bears, and grizzlies. The project operates within a 600-square-mile study site in the Centennial Mountains, which lie west of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Fearing that large carnivores risk genetic isolation within the two parks, the project team wants to find out whether the Centennials are a migratory corridor westward to central Idaho and the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest remaining roadless area in the lower 48 states.
The Centennials have an east-west orientation, unusual in the Rockies, where most ranges extend northwest to southeast. This configuration may provide a link between protected areas. That factor, combined with the range’s diverse habitats, makes the Centennials ideally situated and suited for the study’s purposes. Additionally, the project is designed to assess whether each of the large carnivores can fulfill its role in the ecological niche within the Centennial corridor. It will also identify conflict areas between carnivores and humans, and establish corridor conservation priorities.
Because two of the study subjects, wolves and grizzly bears, are on the U.S. Endangered Species List, it was imperative for the Carnivore Connectivity Project to adopt a risk-free, non-invasive field methodology. So the team hooked up with WDC—Working Dogs for Conservation—a partnership of three Montana women, Megan Parker, Aimee Hurt, and Alice Whitelaw, all of whom are experienced field biologists and accomplished dog trainers and handlers (see "Sniffing Out Poop," page 10). Starting with a San Joaquin kit fox study in California in the year 2000, WDC dogs subsequently worked on scat detection projects involving black-footed ferrets, lynx, and red fox. In another study, WDC dogs located desert tortoises for the Desert Research Institute, part of the University and Community College System of Nevada and the University of Redlands in California. Megan’s dog, a female Dutch shepherd named Carrou, found the carcass of an illegally killed wolf beneath a snowbank in Montana, leading to an arrest and prosecution. WDC partners have also lent their expertise in dog selection, training, and handling to an Amur tiger project in Siberia, cheetah and wild dog detection projects in Kenya, and, most recently, to a brown tree snake project on Guam.
Possessing the extraordinary ability to detect odors at concentrations 100 million times lower than what humans can smell, dogs are ideal for scat detection in conservation work. Not all dogs are equally gifted or of the right temperament, however. So, what do you look for in a detection dog candidate? "Ball drive," Megan explains. "That’s the first thing. If you’re bouncing a ball along an animal shelter corridor and there’s one dog among many whose eyes are riveted on every bounce, that’s the one you try out." A dog, in other words, that would gladly jump through fiery hoops for a few minutes of ball playing.
Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, golden retrievers, and other so-called working breeds are best, though there are plenty of mixed breeds among detection dogs. "You need a dog that will work with people," Alice adds. "Some do, some don’t; it’s a personality thing."
For strenuous fieldwork, a big dog, but not too big, is preferred. A small dog or a lumbering mastiff would wear down quickly. Alice works two German shepherds, Camas and Tsavo; Aimee is partial to her black Labs, Finny and Maggie.
Other desirable traits include maturity, obedience, and agility. Finally, Alice says, "The dogs we look for are dogs that need a job, are happy doing it, stay focused, and disregard anything that might distract them from the task at hand."
WDC dogs, for example, never chase wildlife. The day I accompanied Aimee Hurt and Finny in the field, we encountered a herd of cows that seemed on the verge of stampede when they spotted the dog. For a split second, Finny’s attention wandered, but immediately snapped back into focus when Aimee called him to task.
It takes training, hours of it. Finny and Tsavo were well prepared. Finny had been schooled as a narcotics detection dog but flunked out of the program when he demonstrated an inability to work indoors. Outside he’s fine, but in a building he hyperventilates and pants excessively, which diminishes his sniffing acuity. Tsavo was enrolled in Schutzhund, a program that trains German shepherds in tracking, obedience, and protection. He failed the protection phase because he could not learn to bite, hold, and release correctly. But he tracks well, and biting is not a skill required for scat work.
To appreciate the talents of WDC’s scat dogs, try imagining your way into their olfactory world. Deep in a dog’s snout are structures called turbinates, special sniffing cells. The quantity of turbinates, about 25 times what we humans possess, allows dogs to experience the world as a place of stinking wonder. So the history of a particular location, everything that has been present there for—who knows how long—arrives at a dog’s snout as an aroma cornucopia. Now, imagine that you’ve been taught to ignore perhaps thousands of odors and concentrate on only four, and you’ve just defined the job of the WDC dogs at work here in the Centennials. Elk or moose feces? "Leave it!" Coyote or fox? "Leave it!" Bear, cougar, wolf scat? "Show me! Good girl, good boy!"
 The dogs do it unerringly. "Megan and I were working Camas on kit fox during her first field season," Alice recalls. "And she alerted on something. We saw nothing. It was this wasted area outside Bakersfield, and Camas insisted, as if to say ‘It’s right here!’ So we got down on our hands and knees, started probing the ground, and found this fingernail-size, dried-up piece of kit fox scat."
Megan takes the cue, adding, "It’s amazing to see how this invisible scent world travels in the environment. One of our dogs alerted on bear scat on a streambed under running water. Wouldn’t come off the scent until we saw it and acknowledged the find."
Of course, it helps to have ideal conditions for sniffing things out. And most days the team spends in the Centennials they get just that: moderate temperatures, a slight breeze, moist air. Too much heat and dogs quickly tire; no breeze and it’s harder to pick up a scent cone; too arid and scat samples and dog noses dry out.
Scat collection is nothing new, Beckmann tells me, and scat has long been acknowledged to be an indicator of the presence of a species, its population densities, parasite loads, and food habits. "But extraction of DNA from scat is a new thing in the last ten years or so," he says. "From DNA analyses we can identify not only species but also individual animals, including whether they’re male or female, sex ratios within populations, paternity, kinship, and, theoretically, home range, if we collect, say, 30 to 40 scats from the same animal over a period of time." Analyses of endocrine secretions extracted from samples can determine reproductive status of individuals.
One of the best things about using scat dogs is that it’s a non-invasive survey technique. Wild animals are not pursued, trapped, drugged, handled, or stressed. Moreover, some researchers argue that repeated trapping of individual animals habituates them to humans, making them potentially dangerous and aggressive.
Beckmann also favors scat sampling because it avoids unintended biases that result from trapping, such as the greater frequency of males caught, especially among bears and cougars. Thus scat sampling can yield more representative data than trapping. This method is truly random, he explains. "There’s just as much chance of finding female scat as male scat. Anytime you can minimize stress on animals and get better data, it’s good."
Scat detecting dogs are a valuable tool for field biologists. However, there are limits to what dog-handler teams can do. They probably could not be used in extreme terrain on, say, mountain sheep research. Even if the dogs could negotiate the incredibly steep mountainsides, their handlers probably could not. And dogs wouldn’t be of much help in bird research, except perhaps for ground-nesters.
Cooperation between humans and dogs is nothing new. In fact, the bond between us, stronger than any other human-animal link, dates at least to the late Pleistocene. Today, dogs are relied upon to serve, detect, lead, protect, hunt, herd, and, most recently, to assist in medical diagnoses, as in sniffing out cancer cells. A dog with its nose to the wind may have more to tell us about the natural world than we can imagine.
Arizona-based writer Tom Dollar also went in the field with WCS conservationists who were tracking jaguars in Mexico (see "El Tigre," December 2004). For more about scat detector dogs, log on to www.workingdogsforconservation.org.
|
