16 December 2021| Conservation dogs are using their noses to help to sniff out friend and foe in land management practices with landcare groups and landholders.
Trained sniffer dogs are being used to find the scat of native animals and feral pests to understand their diet and geographic spread within areas of East Gippsland and Queensland. The highly-trained canines are able to do it much quicker than people.
Supported by a Landcare Led Bushfire Recovery Grant, a program jointly managed by Landcare Australia, the National Landcare Network and Landcare peak bodies, the East Gippsland Landcare Network in Victoria recently used detection dogs to locate fox scat.
Following the horrific Black Summer Bushfires in 2019, areas within the district were badly burnt, leaving native animals extremely vulnerable to foxes. The local Landcare group also wanted to understand how many foxes were in the district, what they ate, and where they roamed.
Matt Stephenson, a Project Manager with the East Gippsland Landcare Network, said trained sniffer dogs brought over from Phillip Island were crucial for finding this information and did so in significantly less time than if the Network relied on the legwork of its volunteers.
“What would have taken a week and a half with three or four volunteers only took a day and a half with the dogs,” said Stephenson, when asked about the benefits of using canines for scat detection work.
The dogs had previously been used for fox control to help protect the famous Little Penguins on Phillip Island, so they knew the scent they were looking for before they arrived to work in East Gippsland.
Dog handler, Craig Bester, said he chose English springer spaniels “to sniff out the fox waste because they naturally work from side to side in front of the handler.”
Once collected, the droppings proved the feral foxes ate everything from small lizards and amphibians, to feasting on cattle and sheep carcasses, plus the odd lamb. Stephenson said this information, and an understanding of the fox number and range, all derived from the scat, will be used to strategize control of the vulpine (fox) population.
In Queensland, Noosa and District Landcare were also successful in obtaining a Landcare Led Bushfire Recovery Grant for a Glider survey and restoration project. In the project, sniffer dogs will soon be trialled to understand how well they can find Endangered Greater Gliders, which are notoriously difficult to locate using traditional methods of nocturnal spotlight searches.
Rachel Lyons, Business and Partnerships Manager at Noosa and District Landcare, said Greater Gliders typically reside in the tree canopy, as high as 30 to 50 metres from the ground.
“From the research we have seen, only 4 to 7 percent of gliders are seen by people undertaking standard visual surveys,” Lyons said.
Lyons said the sniffer dogs will be used to locate glider scat in the national park and on private land where they are thought to be found. Lyons said they had a team of 15 volunteers who have been trained to work on the project.
Locating glider populations is crucial to ensuring the species’ survival, so land managers are able to focus their efforts on protecting and managing their unburnt habitat and old trees with large hollows, manage pests and install nest boxes for the animals where they are needed.
“We’ll test the dogs to see if they locate glider scat and test against our normal survey technique to see if they correlate,” she said.
The $14 million Landcare Led Bushfire Recovery Grants Program is supporting projects in regions impacted by the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20, and has been funded by the Australian Government’s Bushfire Recovery Program for Wildlife and their Habitat.
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