Takes a dog to outfox a pest

Dog trainer Steve Austin gives Katie a well-deserved pat. Ecologist Bob Moffat looks on as Gus digs into a fox den and National Parks ranger Holly North puts the co-ordinates of it into her GPS.

Dog trainer Steve Austin says “fox” and the two waiting springer spaniels, Gus and Katie, bound off down the track. Wagging their tails, they cross from the left to the right, noses to the ground, trying to pick up a fox scent. National Parks staff follow, looking for fox prints on the ground. Steve blows his whistle occasionally, signalling to the dogs not to move too far away in their search. The wind picks up and the dogs get more excited, moving more quickly and wagging their tails madly.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got something up his nose already,” Steve said.

Gus has caught a scent and quickly disappears into the bushes with Katie following; they narrow in on a fox den and start digging into a hollow at the stump of a tree. The sand is easy to dig in; foxes find good dens under the root bowls of trees. The dogs have boundless energy and keep working hard, finding active and inactive dens, so occasionally Steve stops to give them a drink of water.

We’re in Broadwater National Park, where National Parks staff and dog trainers are conducting a trial to see if sniffer dogs can help with controlling the region’s fox population. National Parks have had a long-term baiting control program operating since 1997, which is maintained by fox control contractor and ecologist Bob Moffatt.

Today, National Parks staff are hoping the dogs can make the process of finding fox dens more efficient.

Finding fox dens has in the past involved National Parks staff spending lot of time wandering in the bush looking for the dens. The area is a mixture of coastal heathland and shrub on the edge of littoral rainforest; it’s sandy and dense in places and hard to walk through, so having the dogs go directly to where the foxes are will save time, and the dogs can also get in under dense shrubbery that humans can’t get into.

National Parks ranger Liz Dargin marks the co-ordinates of the newly found ‘active’ fox den on her GPS device so she can monitor it and come back and fumigate it at a later date.

Broadwater National Park and the areas to the north of it have been chosen for the trial because they are the breeding areas for threatened bird species the pied oyster-catcher. They are shore birds that nest on the beaches and in the dunes, and they have been under threat by predation from foxes.

Walking down the sandy track, National Parks ranger Holly North keeps an eye to the ground for fox prints and scats, and she tells me she found lots of fox prints on the beach in Cape Byron yesterday while they were scouting the area. Holly has been working on the Shorebird Conservation Project and said while the fox baiting program has been successful, the fox population in Australia was so large that National Parks needed to practise targetted control in priority areas where key native animal species are under serious threat from fox hunting.

The pied oyster-catcher’s nesting season lasts from August to December so staff have been baiting for foxes from July to December, when the birds’ breeding season ends.

Foxes were first introduced into Victoria from England in 1871 by Englishmen who wanted to hunt for them with their dogs. The fox population rapidly spread across mainland Australia along with the introduced European rabbit. Foxes are omnivorous and have been known to eat rabbits, turtles, crabs, native fauna and birds. Today they are commonly found in semi-urban and urban areas where there is an abundance of food and human refuse. Foxes can live for five to 10 years (if they are clever) and their average range is five kilometres.

National Parks pest management officer Lisa Wellman said at this time of year, foxes are also breeding and more likely to be found in their dens, so it’s a good time to look for them and mark them for fumigation.

Lisa said when she first started monitoring the shores of Broadwater National Park in 1994, only one pied oyster-catcher fledging would make it to adulthood because foxes would eat the birds’ eggs and chicks. Since the baiting project started, 150 birds are fledging and surviving every year.

“We know the fox control is working because we banded the birds raised in this area and have been monitoring them,” Lisa said. “We’ve had reported sightings of them in Newcastle and Moreton Island. We are significantly improving the success of the breeding of these birds.”

Lisa met dog trainer Steve Austin at a cane toad forum earlier this year and asked him to get involved in the fox trial. Steve and his wife Vicki had been working as dog trainers for over 20 years and had trained dogs to find specific scents, including rabbits, cats and narcotics, and they plan to train dogs to find cane toads.

When they arrived at the National Park for the trial, Steve and Vicki brought with them a van-load of dogs, including a border collie called Chilli and a Rottweiler called King, who are both trained to find narcotics. Their puppy Bolt is in the process of being trained to hunt for cane toads.

The working springer spaniels, Gus and Katie, were originally trained to find rabbit holes on Macquarie Island in Tasmania, but Steve spent two months training them to find fox scents for the project.

Springer spaniels have been used as gun-hunting dogs in England to retrieve birds such as quail and pheasant. Steve said his two springer spaniels had strong genetic lines and are trained to hunt for an animal and wait, not attack it.

While sniffer dogs are mostly specialists in hunting for one scent, they can be trained to hunt for different scents, but Steve warned “the more targets you give a dog, the less expert a dog will become”.

Steve said the dogs were trained to pick up the target smells gradually, using smell association with proof.

In training them to pick up fox scents, Steve said he would firstly give them a freshly killed fox to play with to allow them to get used to the smell. Then a pelt or object with the fox smell on it would be dragged a short way ahead and the dogs would follow it. The distances the pelt would be dragged became greater as the training went on, until the dogs could identify the smell at great distances.

When the dogs were being trained to sniff out cane toads in drains, Steve said he tested them by having different scents in different tubes, and the dogs needed to identify the target smell in the correct tube.

“Some of the tubes may have had a frog scent, and another a cane toad scent,” Steve said. “The dogs needed to go up to each tube and have a sniff, then sit next to the one with the smell they are trained to find.”

Steve and Vicki together run an animal training and consultancy business in Sydney called Pet Resorts and they both agree that to train a dog you need to have a natural ability for it, and you definitely need to be the ‘top dog’.

“You need to think like a dog and read their body language,” Vicki said.

With their dogs, they found the first truffle in Tasmania in 1999. All of their dogs have been through rigorous specialty training to national and international standards. Steve said part of the dogs’ certification for the Department of Conservation in New Zealand was their ability to calmly hear gun-shots over their heads.

“The dogs are also trained to not touch non-target species,” Steve said. “This gives National Parks and Wildlife staff the security of knowing that the dogs won’t hurt native animals like sugar gliders or possums.

“They have also had food aversion training, for all types of food including McDonalds, to ensure they won’t accidentally eat any poisoned baits in the National Parks… and they’ve had reptile aversion training, including lizards, snakes and turtles.”

Steve and Vicki said when training the dogs to track down scents in the bush, they train the dogs to limit how far they run.

“Working springers will keep going, they never get exhausted,” Steve said.

“Steve uses his whistle when they move too far away, so naturally, they start to work that pattern and stay within those boundaries,” Vicki said.

After trying to follow the dogs up sand dunes and into dense heathland, Steve says he has learned from today’s fox hunting trial in the National Park.

“I’m going to train them to sit and bark when they find a den,” he said. “Then we can find them in the areas it’s hard to get into.”

If the dog trials continue to go well, we could see the dogs being used in future for hunting not just foxes, but other feral animals such as cats, which are decimating native wildlife. It’s also possible that the pesky cane toad’s days in Australia may be numbered with the help of man’s best friend.