THREATENED SPECIES

In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Mojave population of the desert tortoise as a threatened species. Since then, federal, state, and local wildlife and land management agencies and jurisdictions have become actively involved in programs to promote conservation and recovery of the Southwest’s most beloved animal. A forward-looking project, led by Dr. Mary Cablk, Desert Research Institute (DRI), and Dr. Jill Heaton, University of Nevada Reno, has shown that wildlife detection dogs may provide a real advantage in surveying populations of this threatened species. Accurate information about tortoise populations, including breakdowns into age classes, such as adult, sub-adult, juvenile, and neonate, is critical in developing effective conservation strategies to reverse what is believed to be a decline in populations. In their pilot project, trained detector dogs were studied to evaluate their usefulness in sniffing out tortoises in their natural desert habitat. This study was funded by the Redlands Institute at the University of Redlands in California with cooperation from partnering agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Desert Tortoise Conservation Center (DTCC) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Increasing concern over declining populations of rare, threatened, and endangered species is spurring the development of noninvasive methods for censusing, monitoring, and studying these species. Noninvasive approaches to wildlife surveys often rely on “sign” (such as scat [feces], urine, hair, or dens) to detect and track animals without imposing significant disruption on already imperiled species. Finding the species of interest—or target species—can be difficult depending on the size, range, and habits of the species. Well experienced in understanding the abilities of detection dogs, Dr. Mary Cablk believed dogs could fit into the solution for recovering the tortoise populations of the Mojave Desert.

Expanding the body of reliable knowledge about a threatened or endangered species is crucial in improving chances to protect and preserve the species. From this perspective, the study designer, Cablk, an expert in remote sensing technologies and landscape ecology, carefully assembled a team of top-notch specialists in this pilot project to collect critical data about desert tortoises in a scientifically rigorous manner. The team included Dr. Heaton, a desert tortoise biologist; a master dog trainer; three GIS/GPS (geographic information system/global positioning system) database technicians; a cadre of student workers; and professional dog handlers from Working Dogs for Conservation (WDC), a nonprofit organization that has been training canines to successfully locate scat from imperiled or listed carnivores specifically for conservation purposes.