BY STUART WINTER
DISCOVERING quolls is one of Captain James Cook’s lesser known achievements. The national icon and adventurer carved his name in British history with his remarkable exploration of distant lands, navigating HMS Endeavour along the eastern coastline of Australia. However, collecting quolls for scientific study remains one of the great navigator’s more obscure contributions to our global knowledge.
The quoll is one of the animal world’s most fascinating, distinctive and, sadly, vanishing creatures. With their shrew-like snouts and spotted coats, quolls look like a fantasy animal designed by a class of eight-year-olds. But as some of the largest carnivorous marsupials, distantly related to the notorious Tasmanian devil, they are vital to the sensitive ecology of Australia yet are bedevilled by many dangers.
Mining, housing development, farming and pest control poisons have conspired against them. The arrival of predatory cats and foxes followed by cane toads, a juicy but highly toxic meal, have also taken a toll on the quoll.
Protecting and preserving the four distinct species spread across Australia has become an imperative. Finding these shy, nocturnal creatures requires the endeavour of an 18th-century explorer and this is where a remarkable dog called Bear is sailing to the rescue.
Bear has achieved worldwide fame as the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s koala detection dog. His highly sensitive nostrils trained to detect the odour of koala have been put to use finding the eucalyptus-loving creatures so they can be relocated to safer environments before plantation loggers get to work. That super-charged nose is now on the trail of endangered northern quolls on the Mount Emerald wind farm in Queensland. Before the heat of the day takes hold, Bear, a blue-eyed, border colliekoolie cross, is out with handler Riana Gardiner.
One sniff of essence of quoll and Blue drops to the ground, responding to the command of “show me” by indicating where the quoll is holed up in its den. Lots of play and exclamations of “good boy” follow, something that Bear can revel in because he was given up by his original owners due to his high energy and playfulness.
SNIFFING out a quoll allows a worksite to be cordoned off or the animal relocated to a safer area. One of his recent finds saw a mother and her “joeys” protected by halting work in the area. Saving females is vital. Males can easily be translocated, although most die off at around the age of one because intense mating drives them to early graves.
IFAW has sponsored Bear throughout his rigorous training as part of the University of the Sunshine Coast’s detection dog unit. The charity continues to cover his upkeep as a qualified detection dog.
Its campaigner Josey Sharrad explains: “Bear is an amazing dog. He loves to work and he just goes from strength to strength. He’s found koalas, now quolls, so who knows what he is capable of next?
“A dog’s sense of smell is up to 10,000 times better than humans. Australian animals like koalas and quolls are elusive and hard to spot with the human eye. This is why detection dogs are crucial to conservation efforts as they can smell what we can’t see.”
“We are working with the University of the Sunshine Coast to rescue abandoned dogs and train them to be conservation dogs. It’s a win-win,” she adds.