Nature Conservancy Magazine: Winter 2008

Go Deeper

A Nose for Natives
Can dogs help locate rare plants?

Fender's Blue Butterfly
This butterfly would not survive without Kincaid's lupine.

Rogue, a smart and energetic Belgian sheepdog, has been taught all sorts of tricks by his owner, Dave Vesely. On command the dog can sit, roll over or play dead. But Rogue’s best trick is helping to rescue endangered butterflies.

“Predators use their noses to find their prey, so why not use noses for conservation?” says Vesely, who is an ecologist with the Oregon Wildlife Institute. He has trained Rogue to track down a threatened plant called Kincaid’s lupine, a native to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. This purple-blossomed wildflower is key to the survival of the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly, which lays its eggs on the leaves of the lupine.

The butterfly would not survive without this plant, says Greg Fitzpatrick, a Nature Conservancy stewardship ecologist who initiated the project. That’s why his team has been testing out the dogs: Ecologists want to find populations of the lupine, and thus determine priority areas for protection.

Near Corvallis, Oregon, Vesely sends Rogue bounding into the tall fescue carpeting an upland prairie. Suddenly — decisively — the dog sits, holding his pose until Vesely catches up to him, breathless. Rogue is waiting patiently before a Kincaid’s lupine, even though its flower has long since withered.

Trained to smell what wildlife biologists cannot see, dogs are quickly becoming conservation’s best friend. Long known for detecting everything from drugs to truffles, today dogs are locating bobcats in New Jersey, invasive brown tree snakes in Guam and dwindling populations of cheetahs in Kenya.

But using dogs to detect threatened plants is a relatively new thing, says Debbie Smith, co-founder of Working Dogs for Conservation Foundation. After a Montana graduate student tested the concept on spotted knapweed, a notorious invasive species, Smith and her partners teamed up with the Conservancy and Oregon Wildlife to try using dogs to find Kincaid’s lupine.

Two seasons of research in the Willamette Valley have persuaded them to expand the experiment next year. They plan to train the dogs to find not just lupine but lupine with butterfly eggs attached to the leaves. “If we can save these two species, we’ll be protecting many species in our upland prairies,” Fitzpatrick says.

Eventually, the crew expects that detection dogs may help protect entire ecosystems, not just Oregon’s vanishing prairies. Vesely envisions dogs specialized in particular habitat types: Mojave Desert dogs, Willamette prairie dogs and old-growth Doug-fir dogs. For Fitzpatrick, it’s enough to dream about the time and effort dogs can save field biologists: “They can smell through blackberry bushes and thick vegetation. With twice the legs, they’ve got twice the ability to cover rough, steep terrain.”

—Jane Braxton Little