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| Photo by JK |
Sorry that all of our posts have been news links rather than pretty or not so pretty pictures but we have a couple of upcoming camera trap posts in the pipeline.
On to the news where UC Berkeley scientists are teaching dogs so smell cougar, bobcat and fox scat from 80 feet away. This is leading to much more precise location of predator sign then the scientists walking around looking for it themselves.
"Dogs are able to detect a much greater number of scats in much less time than people - it greatly increases our efficiency in the field and allows us to cover much larger areas," said Sarah Reed, a fellow at Colorado State University's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology who researched the dogs while she was a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
The keen canine nose has a long history of identifying contraband and discovering trapped people and bodies. It is only in the last decade or so that wildlife biologists have turned to dogs to help them understand the habits of animals in the wild. At the same time, advances in DNA testing allow researchers to glean ever more detailed information on diet, range and population size from droppings.
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