Peg, Duke, Cody and Macca
Native birds’ best friends
Peg, Cody, Duke and Macca are all a native bird’s best friend. They also happen to be dogs.
Peg is 8. She has long, silky hair, huge hazel eyes and a dark, wet nose that presses into your arm, nuzzling for affection.
That nose is her livelihood – and a lifeline for the kiwi, whio and ka¯ ka¯ po¯ she is trained to find.
An english setter, Peg is one of 70 conservation dogs deployed around the country.
Protected-species dogs, like Peg and her son Duke, track native creatures that are on the brink of extinction: birds, geckos, skinks and now even a ‘‘frog dog’’. Once found, they are banded, monitored or moved to a safer place.
Predator-detection dogs, like Macca and Cody, hunt the invasive species that kill them: rats, cats, stoats, and ants.
Peg and Duke work with their humans, James Fraser and Tash Coad. They all live together in the Takamatua Valley, overlooking Akaroa Harbour, on Banks Peninsula.
Each dog has its own style. Setters are an ancient hunting breed, introduced to England in the 1800s. Their name refers to the almost-seated posture they assume when they’ve scented a bird.
Peg trots through grass, tail wagging. Her nose traces the ground efficiently, all of the 300 million olfactory receptors in her snout sifting through the earthy smells. (Humans have about six million receptors.)
Occasionally her slim, elegant frame shifts direction, seemingly at random. Suddenly, she freezes. One paw leaves the ground and hovers, pointing into the long tussocks. That’s her signal to Fraser: mission accomplished. She watches her quarry closely, but not a feather is ruffled and the bird remains undisturbed in its nap.
‘‘Peg has got the classic foot up – so she will point with her foot – just line down the foot and the nose and you’ve got your target,’’ Fraser says. ‘‘English setters are an indicator dog, so when they hit a scent – in our case mostly kiwi – they will stop and indicate. We can pull out a burrow or catch it [the target] or do whatever we do.
‘‘Retrievers are bred to bring things back to you – that’s not really what we want in our game.’’
Peg responds instantly to Fraser’s commands, remarkably since she is deaf in one ear. ‘‘We imported her from Britain and she had amazing bloodlines . . . and when we got her to New Zealand
she was a lemon,’’ Fraser says. ‘‘She is a real test of my tolerance but she does some really good stuff. She’s a lovely dog and she works very well, she’s just a bit special!’’
Fraser bred Peg with another of his dogs, Percy, and the result was Duke, now 4. ‘‘He is a big, bold dog but he’s a big softie at the same time, so he hasn’t got a heap of confidence. But he is lovely to be around.’’ While Peg points, Duke sits still to indicate he’s found his target.
Fraser, 51, 44-year-old Coad and the dogs spend up to six months of the year away from home, working in the bush or on remote, offshore islands. Often they are living in tents.
‘‘That’s the thing with our dogs, we spend a lot of time with them . . . so it’s not just that the dogs have to be good at what they do, they have to be pleasant to live with,’’ Fraser says.
Finding shy native birds like kiwi is challenging. Although many are tagged with radio transmitters, that gives rangers only a general location. Pinpointing them while they sleep deep in their burrows is next to impossible for a human.
‘‘[Recently] we were working in the Kahurangi National Park looking for great spotted kiwi and they have got territories of 30 hectares and you’d have to look down a lot of holes, burrows and rotten logs to try and find a kiwi. A dog will find them from 100 metres away.’’
Fraser trains his dogs using homing pigeons, which he keeps in a loft at home. ‘‘We can make sure our dog is safe and behaving the way we want it to before we show them what a kiwi, ka¯ ka¯ po¯ or a whio is, and then once we are out in the field it is just making sure that behaviour transfers to the new target.’’
The bond between a detector dog and its ‘‘boss’’ is complex and intense – and completely integral to the work. The dog is constantly looking to the human for signals and commands. The ‘‘boss’’ is watching for any change in the animal’s behaviour.
‘‘They are very, very clever at what they do and very good at reading people’s behaviours as well,’’ Fraser says. ‘‘We were working on Codfish Island, where they have got ka¯ ka¯ po¯ that nest really close to the ground. [The dog detected something] and thinking it was a ka¯ ka¯ po¯ , I got my torch out, and looked in the hole.
‘‘But what I saw was a ka¯ ka¯ . That’s all it took for the dog to think: ‘oh, he’s interested in ka¯ ka¯ today, so all day we were finding ka¯ ka¯ !’’
Ka¯ ka¯ po¯ owe much of their survival to detector dogs. Almost 40 years ago, when they were believed to be on the brink of extinction, a labrador and a german short-haired pointer and their boss, Gary Aburn, located a female population of the birds. They were translocated to Codfish Island, a turning point for the species.
‘‘Two hundred birds were found . . . all of those were found by dogs, so ka¯ ka¯ po¯ would be extinct now if it wasn’t for dogs,’’ Fraser says. ‘‘There [is also] Operation Nest Egg, where kiwi eggs are recovered from the wild, where they are at risk from rats, possums and cats . . . they are brought to safety, incubated, hatched and raised up. And the primary way of finding those nests . . . is by dogs.
‘‘So yeah, they are saving lives.’’
Not all canines are a friend to native birds – dogs can crush a weak-chested kiwi with even just a nudge. That’s why detector dogs are so extraordinary: they can quietly and determinedly seek out fragile birds, without harming a feather. They hunt alongside heedless penguins, unused to predators in the uninhabited sub-Antarctic islands, and patiently ignore persistently curious weka in the bush.
‘‘To me, success isn’t measured in how many birds they find,’’ Fraser says. ‘‘It is whether they find the bird safely and they can walk past nine other birds to find the one bird safely.’’
Humans sniff once every 1.5 seconds; dogs up to 10 times a second. Where we see the world, dogs smell it.
So conservation dogs’ ability to home in on one scent, amid a field of other distractions, is what makes them very special. Their skills are sought out all over the world: from Australia, to Europe, the US and even South America.
If dogs could earn airpoints, Macca and Cody would be gold elite.
Macca has flown all over New Zealand – he’s a ‘‘noisy flier’’ – and is just back from hunting stoats on Scotland’s Orkney Isles. Cody, whose speciality is tracking rodents, spent 14 months on Australia’s sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island.
Cody is a nine-year-old border terrier/fox terrier cross. Macca, 5, is a wirehaired pointer crossed with a heading dog.
They live in Northland with Sika, a six-monthold pup, and their human Angela Newport. If all
goes well with her training, Sika will soon be sniffing out feral cats.
‘‘We are looking for a very small animal in a very large habitat and usually in habitats that are quite full of everything else,’’ Newport says. ‘‘You will disturb and find other things that they have to ignore.
‘‘Their noses will always be working. You can see them going: ‘that’s that [smell] and that’s that smell.’ They will identify those things around them and ignore them.
‘‘Then, you’ll get the: ‘ah, this is the one I am looking for’ and it will be a different reaction. You have to know it quite well – it’s not a sort of sit down and look, like a drug dog, it is not at all that simple.’’
Dogs get enormous pleasure from detecting objects, or prey, from scent. New Zealand’s pest-detection dogs – and their handlers – are so sought after because they can work for long periods without finding anything.
That is a key skill in post-eradication programmes, where the dogs are deployed to see if pest control has worked.
‘‘We are one of the leading countries in taking invasive species off habitats and [then] . . . in trying to find something that might not be there,’’ Newport says. ‘‘Getting down to nothing and trying to find nothing – proving zero – is a really hard ask. The dog is set on finding the one thing that you want him to find, and when they can’t find it, they can get a bit worried.
‘‘You need to be sure that they won’t get bored and go off and chase a rabbit. You have got to keep them motivated and keep them happy and be aware that they need to succeed. I think that’s why our detection dogs are sought after . . . we have a lot of experience of it.’’
Newport, 38, and her dogs don’t just seek. They also track and analyse predator behaviour, which then helps with eradication plans.
At a kiwi creche near Napier, Macca sniffed out stoat droppings, which helps build a profile of the killer. ‘‘We can look at why scat might be full of rabbit fur – that means it was eating it on the outside; there are no rabbits on the inside.
‘‘We ask what else it is going to eat in here that is going to be a better food source. If you know how it is feeding, and you know how it is behaving, and you know how the prey behaves, then you can manipulate how you target the predator.
‘‘And in one day, the dog just finds what he is looking for and he’s happy.’’
Good boy.
‘‘They are very, very clever at what they do and very good at reading people’s behaviours as well.’’