DEM’s Latest – and Cutest – Turtle Tracker is a Dog
By Cynthia Drummond / ecoRI News contributor
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| Newt is spending several weeks this summer working on a Rhode Island turtle survey. His handler is St. Lawrence University senior Julia Sirois. (Kristine Hoffmann) |
Newton,
appropriately nicknamed Newt, is a fox red Labrador retriever trained to detect
several species of turtles. He comes to work every day raring to go, and is
delighted to be paid in tennis balls.
Newt
and his handler, St. Lawrence University senior Julia Sirois, are a couple of
weeks into a six-week summer project to survey Rhode Island’s most threatened
turtle species.
The
research project is a collaboration involving the Rhode Island Department of
Environmental Management (DEM), the University of Rhode Island, St. Lawrence
University in Canton, N.Y., and Roger Williams Park Zoo.
DEM
state herpetologist Scott Buchanan said there were several turtle species the
state wanted to learn more about.
“We’re
two weeks into this, and I would say, already we can be certain that Newt is
proficient at finding turtles,” he said. “Whether Newt will be ultimately more
proficient than just a team of people doing visual encounter surveys is one of
the questions that we want to try to answer, and we are framing the work around
that question.”
The
primary objective of the study is to find out how many turtles of the
less-common species are living in Rhode Island and where they are.
Buchanan said Newt and Sirois would complement ongoing conventional visual surveys.
“Having
another team out there with a dog is just an opportunity to learn more,” he
said. “It’s an opportunity to potentially identify new populations and to learn
more about existing populations.”
Newt
and Sirois are conducting repeated surveys at three sites.
“We
learn a little bit more with every new turtle that we find,” Buchanan said.
In
the case of one rare species, every one of Newt’s finds is a small victory.
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| Newt, who wears goggles to protect his eyes from the underbrush, has been trained to detect turtles. (Julia Sirois) |
“We
know so little about the species on the landscape across all of Rhode Island
that the simple act of Newt finding a new turtle in a new location might put
that location on our radar for the first time,” Buchanan said. “It all begins
with inventory and monitoring.”
(The
species and locations of the research are not being disclosed in this story out
of concern about poaching, mostly for the pet trade.)
In
addition to being recorded in a database, each turtle is marked and fitted with
a passive integrated responder, or PIT tag, which contains a microchip that
allows researchers to track its movements.
The
data will be analyzed after the conclusion of the fieldwork.
Newt’s
owner, Kristine Hoffmann, is Sirois’ conservation biology professor at St.
Lawrence University. Hoffmann said she had considered several dog breeds before
settling on a Labrador retriever.
“Because
I’m a reptile and amphibian biologist, I wanted something that was going to be
happy in the water, easy to pull ticks off of, dry really quick,” she said.
Hoffmann
acquired Newt from Radar Kennel in Ohio, which specializes in breeding field
dogs. As a highly specialized dog that needs to work, he would be ill-suited to
life as a family pet.
“They
breed and train hunting dogs,” Hoffmann said. “Newt is specifically trained for
upland game, so he’s more scent-oriented and more upland-oriented than a normal
Labrador that would be watching to see where the gun is pointing and trying to
watch the birds as they fall.”
Newt
and Hoffmann trained with K9 College, a service and narcotics detection dog
training facility in Watertown, N.Y.
Newt
lives with Hoffmann in her home, but she describes him as more of a companion
than a pet.
“He
is like my little boy, but he’s not like a pet,” she said. “He is very hyper
when he’s not working. He’s got a lot of energy and a lot of emotion, and I
tell people he’s got very high emotions and very low thresholds.”
When
Newt is not working, he is exercising.
“We
do a lot of three-hour walks or an hour of fetch, and that calms him down
enough that I can live with him, but he’s not satisfied the way he is when he’s
working,” Hoffmann said.
Hoffmann
also brings Newt to her office at the university.
“I
have a gate at the end of my office. When students walk by in the hallway, he
puts his head out in the hallway and all the students pet him. He gets a lot of
attention from the students. A lot of them will take him for walks during the
day, too,” she said.
Newt
spent part of last summer on Cape Cod, looking for spadefoot toads, but it
turned out that he was far more adept at sniffing out turtles.
“I
wanted to find a project where he would actually make a real difference,”
Hoffmann said. “He’s much better at turtles.”
When
Newt detects a turtle, he signals, or alerts, by lying down.
“Some
of his finds have been exciting for me,” she said. “There was a pile of brush
that was probably a meter and a half tall and two meters wide and he was
walking around it and walking around it, and then he lay down and alerted and
looked up and stared at me, just smiling and panting. And I came over and
looked, and there was a turtle in the middle of this pile of brush and there
was just no way I could have found that without him.”
Reached
at her home in Portland, Maine, on her day off, Sirois described her
relationship with Newt, who could be heard in the background, panting and
giving the occasional low bark.
“He’s
been really good roommate, I have to say,” she said. “He’s actually really,
really good at just relaxing when it’s time, because of the amount of work he
does, so it makes it a lot easier for me,” she said.
On
days when the team is working, they are in the field for up to six hours.
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| Newt, a Labrador retriever who has been trained to sniff out turtles, works for one, and only one reward, his ball. Newt has been paired with St. Lawrence University senior Julia Sirois on a Rhode Island turtle survey that is taking place over several weeks this summer. (Kris Hoffmann) |
“He’s
working that whole time,” Sirois said. “He gets breaks every 20 minutes or, at
the end of a transect, which is a kilometer long, he gets a good break where
he’s playing fetch, he’s relaxing, swimming, and then on our days off, I’m out
all day with him, pretty much.”
Sirois
began scent training with Newt more than a year ago.
“I got to start going to different courses with him, learning more about the importance of the handler in putting him in the right direction of the wind, understanding how scents move, winds move, in order to best set the dog up for success,” she said.
“And then, I learned a lot about body language, his cues,
and got to start building on that. So then, this past fall, I had the
opportunity to pick a species and start training him on it myself, with
[Hoffmann’s] guidance, of course.”
Newt
isn’t the first turtle-detection dog, but he is the first one to work in Rhode
Island. Lou Perrotti, director of conservation programs at Roger Williams Park
Zoo, said he liked the idea of using a dog to find turtles.
“I’ve
seen the use of dogs … using them for scat detection, population monitoring,
but now, to use dogs to help us find elusive species, I think, is very
beneficial for us,” he said. “These dogs can help us find the little-age
classes that are almost impossible to find — hatchlings, sub-adults. These are
very secretive animals for humans to find but a dog’s nose can pick them right
up, so I think it’s valuable for us in making sure that any research we are
doing with any particular turtle species, we can get the whole picture by using
dogs.”
Newt’s
motivation is not conservation, or play, or even treats. It’s his ball.
“He
will do his job so he can get his ball, because he doesn’t care about the
turtle,” Hoffman said. “If you put food in front of him and you’re holding the
ball, he will not eat the food. He wants the ball.”