As part of ongoing conservation efforts, Dr. Richard Bergl, Curator of Conservation and Research at the North Carolina Zoo brought in our dog/biologist teams to help gather dung samples for a genetics and parasitology study. We worked with field staff of Wildlife Conservation Society’s Takamanda-Mone Landscape Project (WCS) at Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary and Mone River Forest Reserve. The dung our dogs found there will be analyzed by Dr. Bergl to learn how many gorillas live in these areas, and will also be studied by Dr. Tom Gillespie, Associate Professor at Emery University and affiliate with the Centers for Disease Control to learn about diseases that gorillas may have picked up from people or livestock in their forests.

This was the first time that conservation dogs have worked in an African tropical environment on a primate project and we were very excited to be involved. Read on  for a photo-essay of our time in Cameroon: Finding Gorillas in Cameroon…

Credit: Constance Baltuck

In August we spent 18 days in Kobuk Valley National Park fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle, to participate in a bear conservation project with the National Park Service. During our time there Wicket, Lily and Orbee were all hard at work, crossing sand dunes (yes, sand dunes!), clambering in and out of mosquito-infested swamps, fearlessly pushing their way through alder thickets, blueberry patches and colorful, aromatic moss-carpeted forests in search of grizzly and black bear scat. Read more here…

Wicket contemplates her mission as the panda and Chinese flags flap behind her at Wanglang reserve, which typifies the mountainous western portion of Sichuan province known for its steep terrain and most famous resident: the giant panda. Though we tromped through some bamboo forest iconic as the panda’s home, we did not seek them. Instead we sought the less renowned moon bears, or more specifically, their scat.

Asiatic black bears (commonly called moon bears) are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) as “vulnerable” due to habitat loss and poaching across their range. IUCN reports that the population has decreased by about 30-50% over the last few decades and, without significant conservation measures, will likely continue to decrease at this rate.

Moon bears are targets of poaching due to the demand for gall bladders and paws, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Smithsonian National Zoo Senior Scientist, Dr. William McShea and his collaborators at Peking University oversee a research project on these sensitive bears. McShea contacted WDC in hopes that we could accompany Karl Malcolm to Sichuan province to visit several forest reserves. Malcolm is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, who is undertaking this moon bear genetic and hormone study as part of his dissertation research.

Malcolm has designed a noninvasive study based on collecting genetic and endocrine data from Asiatic black bear scats (feces) from in and around nine nature reserves in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.  Additionally, he is analyzing scats from black bears at Animal Asia Foundation’s Moon Bear Rescue Center near Chengdu, Sichuan to better understand how sex and season shape stress hormone secretions. Malcolm, Dr. McShea, and their other collaborators are hoping to learn if (and which) landscape variables (such as elevation, vegetation, habitat fragmentation, road density, and human development) are related to stress levels in wild bears. Through repeated genetic sampling, they hope to come up with population estimates for some parts of the study area, as well as to see if bears from neighboring reserves are able to reach one another and breed. Population estimates for black bears in China vary and are unsubstantiated, so this study is poised to contribute to the small amount that is known about black bears in China.

Under Malcolm’s guidance, reserve field technicians have been working diligently to collect scats inside and outside of reserves for a couple of months each year for the past three years. However, it has proven challenging to find scat in some of the reserves and human-interface areas on the border of reserves. So, this fall, Wicket and I went to Sichuan to target five of the reserves and outlying areas. Wicket has located thousands of scats from wild North American black bears and grizzly bears in her five-year career as a conservation dog, and I have accompanied her over hill and dale in search of all of them. As a team, we were ready for this new challenge.

Our project took place in the Sichuan province, an area acclaimed for its spicy chili-based cuisine and for being a terminus of the silk road trading route. The Sichuan province was in the news most notably in recent past for the 7.9-magnitude earthquake in May 2008 that killed about 70,000 people, leaving thousands more missing and millions homeless. While we saw some evidence of the disaster, we also experienced the generous hospitality of the local people, were introduced to the varied foods and customs of different ethnic groups in quaint villages, and became intimate with the dramatic landscape. I was heartened to learn that in a country of almost a billion and a half people that so many were friendly and engaging and there remain breathtaking tracts of wilderness among the mountains.

Karl, Wulan, and a local worker collect a moon bear scat from the steep and lush mountainside

One Friday afternoon on our way out of the field, these festive and friendly folks-just done with their week of work at the lead factory across the street- hailed us over to share a beer with them.

On a typical day in the field, we hauled ourselves up and down steep slopes searching for moon bear scat, and nearly every night we ate with a group of local people and made toasts to one another. Between work and social dinners, Wicket and I turned heads as we walked the streets of small cities or villages where, along with our project leader, Karl Malcolm, we were the only “laowai,” or foreigners, around. Every day brought us a new adventure, starting with the trip from Montana to Chengdu, China.

Day 1: Is it fair to call this a single day? Over 100 hours of preparatory phone calls, emails, permit applications and other paperwork went into organizing this epic journey for Wicket and me to get from Missoula, Montana to Chengdu, China. We organized it carefully so that at each stop, Wicket would have a chance for a long layover in order to get fresh air, stretch, go to the bathroom. This means in San Francisco we had time for a walk in Golden Gate Park.

Fellow travelers on the inter-terminal tram at San Francisco airport helped me as I scooted into the crowded tram with two large suitcases, my backpack, and Wicket in a travel crate. They marveled at what a good traveler she is. When told we were going all the way to China, they got even closer and looked into her crate to ooh and aah, a prelude to the minor celebrity status she would achieve in China.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, about halfway through the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, I tried to remove my contact lenses while in my seat. One lens leapt from my fingers and disappeared into the dark plane. I had no back-up and began to contemplate what life was going to be like with mismatched vision over the next month. Fortunately though, I found it five minutes later in the middle of the aisle, right before the food cart ran it over. I was thrilled but hoped that I didn’t just use up all of my good luck. I didn’t know it yet, but the aforementioned contact-crushing food cart brought me a meal that contained the last butter I would taste for a month.

After fifty-two hours of traveling and about five hours of sleep in ninety-six hours, I finally arrived in Chengdu, China. While waiting by the luggage carousel, I looked around to see where Wicket might emerge. When I heard a growing titter and murmur from the crowd, I turned to see her in her travel crate, inching down the conveyor belt amidst the suitcases and other luggage. As I gathered her off the belt and onto my little cart, a group started to gather around me; it was mostly children, but also some adults, eager to peer into Wicket’s crate and see the big black dog. People happily greeted me too, with the eager Hall-o that I would hear at least a dozen times a day during my stay in China.

After meeting up with the rest of my party arriving from the USA, Wicket and I went to the apartment where we were to spend the night. I was very aware that the bed was harder than any I’ve met in the U.S., but at hour fifty-three, I was very grateful to be flat and stretched out. At 2 a.m., as I arranged the bedding for maximum fluff, I heard through the open window that the neighbors were still awake and apparently cooking something. Next I heard a pop and sizzle and caught the breath-stealing vapor of chili peppers being sautéed and felt like I’d been maced. I gasped, my eyes watering and nose burning, and said out loud Welcome to Sichuan as I drifted off to sleep.

Day 2: We moved to Animal Asia Foundation’s Moon Bear Rescue Center on the outskirts of Chengdu. The Center rescues bears from bile farms around China, giving them a healthy and enriching alternative to their troubled lives on bile farms (read more at http://www.animalsasia.org/index.php?UID=97PHBYFBNQP) This was our opportunity to train Wicket with scat samples from bears that Wicket had not yet encountered. Also, we stayed in guest rooms not twenty feet from one of the exercise areas where a dozen Moon bears slept and frolicked. Our dogs don’t usually get to meet the producer of the scat, and with their noisy antics, Wicket wasn’t sure what to make of them.

Waiting for us at the Bear Rescue Center (BRC) were three HUGE bags of high quality Royal Canin dog food donated to us by Mars Petfoods and delivered speedily by the Royal Canin team. We couldn’t have been more excited by their support for our work in China. Dog food that fits our high standards is hard to come by there. While clearly Wicket was going to be well-fed and happy for the month, she couldn’t possibly get through all of it by herself. Thankfully, the BRC could readily use whatever Wicket could not. Not only have they adopted all the street dogs and cats around the center, but there was one bear who seemed to have food allergies that they hadn’t quite figured out. This particular kind of hypoallergenic dog food would allow them to figure out the source of her allergies.

Our dogs don’t usually get to meet the producer of the scat, and with their noisy antics, Wicket wasn’t sure what to make of them.

Day 4: Headed to our first forest reserve, Tangjihe, where Wicket trained on wild moon bear scat. The drive was about four hours along an expressway, which was a newly paved very well maintained road. Then we went on a roadway along the river bottom, in a valley heavily hit by the earthquake in May 2008. Ten days prior to our drive this road was flooded out and several sections were destroyed by mudslide. The road had reopened just that morning. Clean-up and construction were evident everywhere, both from the recent flood and the 2008 earthquake. We stopped at a memorial in a small village that had been hit especially hard in 2008—nearly 1,000 of the town’s 1,700 residents were killed. A few more were killed during a landslide triggered by the recent flood. Steep mountains (often plowed into farmland) and small valleys leave little room for the earth to slide or the waters to rise without harming causing major damage to villages.

Some of the dozens of crosses at the May 12, 2008 memorial, erected to honor the nearly 1,000 of the town’s 1,700 residents who were killed in the massive quake. A few more people were killed during a landslide triggered by the recent flood, visible here as the muddy swath along the mountain in the background.

In a land of new food, the thing about taste is that in terms of flavor, I think people are very adaptable and can tolerate a wide array of flavors. But it’s the texture that offers the greater challenge. I thought about this as I worked my way through the slices of pig ear and beef tendon. I made a really rookie move with the beef tendon—I put two large pieces of it in my bowl before I knew whether or not I liked it. I didn’t, but I then had to eat the two pieces anyway. I wondered, if the tendons and feet and skin and fat and ears and intestines are all being served as main dishes, then what are the sausages made of?

Can you spot the pig ears in the photo? (photo K.Malcolm)

Day 5: Our first day of training on wild scats in Tangjihe, the reserve where people had found the greatest number of bear scats. Training consisted of everyone in the party—including Wicket—scouring the mountainside in search of scats. On the drive into the reserve we were waylaid by a new landslide that covered the road. Though a few vehicles braved their way over the rubble, we waited for a backhoe to clear the debris. I learned that these diversions are to be expected, and so I shouldn’t count on any hard and fast start time to each day.

While we waited for the landslide to be cleared, some more intrepid travelers went for it (and very nearly slid off the road). (photo K.Malcolm)

Compared to U.S. black bear standards, there aren’t that many bears, so Wicket and I and seven other people only found four scats that day, and Wicket didn’t find any of them first. I definitely felt like I had something to prove. People weren’t used to a working partnership with a dog and therefore didn’t trust her to be useful. It felt like a lot of pressure.

There were some seriously steep and slippery mountains in that part of the Sichuan Province and land leeches as well—at least three of them got Wicket that day. Luckily, their bite goes by unnoticed but their anti-coagulant means that their bites bleed quite a bit and look pretty gruesome.

Periodically we’d stop to pull the leeches off of Wicket. Many people wore blue leech socks which are tightly woven booties worn under boots and over pants that worked pretty well at staving off the bloodsuckers.

A much more impressive foe walloped me for the first time that day—a stinging nettle plant. It created blisters and irritated me for days. The Chinese species certainly would win a fight with the American variety any day of the week. At dinner we were served battered and fried stinging nettle leaves, so revenge was mine.

I made a potentially grave error when I realized partway through the Sprite I was drinking that it tasted very odd, wasn’t really carbonated, and that I couldn’t recall breaking the seal on the cap. I was not the first person to unknowingly drink from a used bottle refilled in the river, but I have traveled to fifteen countries so I wish I could say I was too savvy for such a ruse. At dinner that night we partook in much toasting with the potent traditional Chinese grain alcohol, baijiu. Reminiscent of chemicals from chemistry class, it wasn’t really a favorite of mine though I learned to gam bei, or bottoms-up, many a glass. I quickly learned to request the room-temperature, 10% alcohol, Snow brand beer that every establishment had instead of baijiu. That night, I just let the spirits battle the Sprite, may the best toxin win.

Our field crews were often large and changed personnel often. Here Aimee, Bill, Wicket, two local reserve ranger, Wulan, and Lisheng wait for the rest of the crew to catch up (photo K.Malcolm)

Day 6: Wicket found all six of the scats that we collected that day! She was a master and really started proving her worth to the people there, so I knew we were ready for some “real” searches.

It was a great day for appreciating nature: I saw a takin (a beefy mountain goat type mammal) on a mountainside meadow, learned to identify (and mostly avoid) stinging nettle, and watched a gorgeous rhinoceros beetle go about his business. Wicket found the beetle curious, while the beetle, I inferred from his hissing retort to her attentive sniffing, found Wicket disagreeable.

Not everyone in China liked Wicket, this rhinoceros beetle didn’t appreciate her attention.

Way up the mountain we came across an old village site, with some stone farming terraces still in place, as well as some foundations and tombs which reminded me that no matter how new to me, the mountain under my feet had been tread by generations of people before me. Throughout the day, I narrowly missed getting touched on the face by painful and itchy spines of a caterpillar, encountered a lot of brambles, and pulled four leeches off myself, but it was a great day. We enjoyed lots of laughing among our crew and capped off the day with a swim in a cold and swift creek alongside some Brown dippers (small aquatic song birds) who were also enjoying the invigorating water.

I dodged a stinging nettle only to have Karl point out that in the process I narrowly missed brushing my face against this painful, but pretty, caterpillar

Dinner that night was delicious! There were sweetened walnuts, cold mashed potatoes with vinegar for dipping, greens with pork, battered and fried eggplant with dollops of pork in the center, battered and fried nettles, twice cooked pork, mushroom and chicken soup, eggs and greens, sliced tomatoes, smoked beef, gingery greens, pork ribs and potatoes. If only all days were like that one.

I’m inexplicably joyous about showing off my first leech bites (photo K.Malcolm)

Day 7: It took some continual reminding to get our forest reserve companions to stop whistling to Wicket while she was working, and at each reserve we worked with different locals and so this coaching process began anew. I found that women tended to shy away from her and seemed convinced that she would bite them, whereas the men opted to whistle and approach her, though only for a better look, they didn’t want to touch her or have her close enough to touch them. On the other hand, Wicket, who has been given the moniker Lick it, didn’t understand why she couldn’t offer her usual enthusiastic greeting to anyone within tongue range.

We moved to a new location—Pingwu City—which was a charming town, much more cosmopolitan but still small enough to not be overwhelming. It became my favorite city in the whole province. We were treated to lunch with the mayor at a fancy restaurant, where I sat in between Smithsonian National Zoo Senior Scientist, Dr. William McShea (“Bill”) and Karl. The three of us were working our way through the duck tongues we were served, which we couldn’t quite figure out how to eat (and I could barely even keep ahold of in my chopsticks), when I got a horrible fit of the giggles. I was VERY close to spewing a mouthful of food, and I started sweating and crying. Everyone looked at me, though trying to be nice about it and not really look at me. So much for my career as an ambassador. Hopefully my overall chopstick ineptitude and constant smiling and nodding during toasts either distracted people from my gaffe or convinced them I was too simple-minded to be offensive.

Day 8: We left Pingwu City to work near Wanglang Reserve. We were delayed about half an hour on the drive because of a landslide that was actively sliding—a bunch of boulders and rocks, and even one tree, tumbling down the steep slope. I had never seen, or heard, such a thing before. It sounded kind of like a souped-up musical rain stick. At the end of our search it started to hail quite fiercely and three of us huddled over Wicket to keep the pieces from pummeling her. The hail was small, but certainly smarted with a direct hit.

Bill waits for the mountain to stop raining rubble so we can continue on to Wanglang Reserve (photo K.Malcolm)

Wanglang Reserve is home to about 30 pandas and has a hotel and other facilities in order to attract eco-tourists. During our cold and rainy stay, however, we were the only people there, which created a simultaneous pampered yet post-apocalyptic effect.

Karl and Wulan getting pelted by the hail. Meanwhile, I huddled under a tree with Wicket to deflect any direct hits. (photo K.Malcolm)

Day 9: Rained out. Spent the day loitering at Wanglang reserve. We were all restless by the end of the day having nothing to do but play cribbage and wish we had some DVDs to watch. At dinner everyone was fidgety. Malcolm taught Wulan, PhD candidate at Peking University who served as our translator, how to set up beer caps or coins on her elbow and then catch them. She was quite excited about it.

I learned that there was a traffic jam outside of Beijing that had already lasted a week and wasn’t expected to clear for several more weeks. Apparently it was 100km long. Prior to my arrival in China, I couldn’t have comprehended how that was possible, but after experiencing the odd, and frequently terrifying, driving habits of many people, I started to understand. Many millions of people in China are buying cars for the first time each year, and the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle it.

Day 10: I learned the hand signs for how to count up to ten. This allowed me a degree of independence from Wulan as with hand signals I could go out and purchase a banana, for example, all by myself.

Day 11: Working in the third reserve along our journey we had a very successful day of finding four scats in an area around a bear-raided beehive. We humans had just walked over the first scat in a tall grassy area when Wicket doubled back and pointed it out to me. Score one for the nose! To get to this area we had to cross a cable bridge that had been damaged by a flood and had only one cable left intact as it carried us across the river. I rigged up Wicket’s long leash into a harness and I walked first with her on leash and Karl held tight to her harness while following closely behind. She was completely unperturbed and sure-footed, but I prefer to be overly cautious. At the end of the day, the reserve worker said that Wicket was a very good dog, and he’d like to have a dog like that. Wicket’s charm and impressive skill had won over another local.

Their hive upended and destroyed by a moon bear, these bees swarmed to a nearby tree, their queen, no doubt, in the center. (photo K.Malcolm)

Time to harness-up for the return trip across the damaged bridge (photo K.Malcolm)

Day 12: My least favorite sound in China was the ubiquitous hocking-up of phlegmy spit which is acceptable public behavior there. Still lying in bed, I heard the first loogie being expectorated by a man on the street outside my window. So, I started counting. Despite many hours out of town and away from most people, I still reached thirty seven by the end of the day.

That day, Wicket befriended a developmentally disabled girl, whose joyous laughter made it clear that Wicket was the highlight of her week.

One of our Chinese colleagues affectionately called Wicket “Wiki” and inquired as to whether she could have “children of her own.” He noted that she was a bit like a person in her attentive and interactive characteristics.

I used a farmer’s water closet which was just a boarded off corner of the pig pen. The pigs were snuffling me through the cracks as I availed myself of the facilities, and they, apparently, were eager to avail themselves of whatever I might leave behind—a very resourceful waste-management system.

Words and phrases I had learned at this point: nothing, barbeque, hello, thank you, noodles, leech, dog, beer, boss man, foreigner, server lady, stop, pretty lady, what is the cost, and feces (or perhaps a slang word for feces).

Some of Wicket’s new best friends

Day 13: Went out for hot pot for dinner, a famous Sichuan dish of boiling spicy oil in which various ingredients are dunked and boiled. We added some easily identified and quite American items such as boneless strips of beef and hard boiled eggs, as well as some things not found at any midwestern House of Hunan—coagulated duck blood, somebody’s stomach, and whole tiny squid. Because of all the oil volatilizing in the restaurant, the floor was as slick as a waterslide.

Day 14: Day off in Pingwu City. While on a walk around the city, Wicket did an excellent job of being an ambassador with a group of young boys at the basketball court. They were compelled by her, and yet a little frightened. They darted in toward her and dared to touch her and then jumped back away from her again and laughed and squealed. She proved to be the perfect dog for this by being so steady around people who are nervous of her. We were the only foreigners there and certainly drew a lot of attention on a daily basis.

I had a chicken foot in my dinner, which tasted just fine. It’s eaten by biting it apart toe by toe and rolling it around with the tongue and sucking on it until just the bone is left. It doesn’t take long as the rooster paw, as it’s often called, is not known for being meaty. After dinner I got a “blind man massage.” Blind men in China are assigned to the job of being a masseur, with the idea being that their sense of touch is amplified because of the blindness. My masseur had a storefront set up, and I lay down on a bed, fully clothed, within full view of passersby on the street. It was a very pleasant hour-long massage for about five dollars.

It looked like the boys were daring each other to pet Wicket. It was all wagging and giggles, and she was a great sport.

Day 15: We drove to our fourth reserve. The road was under construction, as all roads seemed to be, but was especially notable as part of the road was completely under overhanging rock. It was like driving through a tunnel except one side was open to the river. At one point we drove through a misty waterfall, its terminus landed directly on the road.

We worked with a reserve worker who said he didn’t think Wicket would be able to find any scat. But in patches of autumn olive trees, she ended up finding seventeen scats, our biggest score of the whole project! I was delighted to be able to show off what she could do and make converts of the locals.

Everyone that night came out to celebrate our success, and baijiu and beer flowed freely. Unfortunately, the bed bugs also came out, and the next morning I stopped counting my bites when I hit the 100 mark and had only gotten as high as my knee on one leg.

Wulan shows off a delicious (to bears, at least) autumn olive berry (photo K.Malcolm)

Aimee, Wicket, and Karl surrounded by the day’s glorious haul of seventeen scats. Time to celebrate with some baijiu.(photo K.Malcolm)

Day 16: Met a villager today who hoped that Wicket was a male so that she could breed with his little black dog. He felt her pelt and admired her. Such a large, well fed and cared for dog was unusual and impressed people.

At one point our two local guides were taking a break on the hillside as Wicket was working uphill from them. She caught scent of a sample that they were unwittingly sitting just 2m from, and she worked to it then alerted. They were very impressed that she found it when they couldn’t see it. They didn’t expect that we’d find scat that day because no one had seen any bears there recently. She found other fresh scats under a tree that looked like it had old bear damage, perhaps from a year prior, yet there was fresh scat there anyway. When Bill learned of Wicket’s successes, he called her “a wonderment,” one of the finest accolades she has ever received.

Aimee and Wicket, whose leash was being proudly held by one of her fans. (photo K.Malcolm)

Day 17: As we traveled from Pingwu City back to Chengdu, we passed a convoy of army men who stared at me. I smiled and waved to them like I was in a parade, which elicited many waves in return. On the way, we stopped in a larger city and had pizza at Pizza Hut for lunch. Though I never eat at Pizza Hurt when I’m home, there it constituted comfort food.

Day 18: A man on the street in Chengdu offered me seventy Yuan for Wicket (about ten dollars). This was not an uncommon occurrence. We had a hard time getting a cab to take us to Wicket’s quarantine office appointment as no one wanted a large dog in their vehicle. We finally found a cab driver who took us, as long as we kept Wicket on the floor of the back seat. She rode around most places on the floor of the front seat between my legs. She was so incredibly accommodating and go-with-the-flow about everything that I was pleased and proud of her every day.

It was impressively smoggy in Chengdu, a city of almost 12 million people. At midday it was sort of greenish yellow and incredibly hazy. My glands were swollen and my throat became sore within a few hours of arriving. It was humid too and my skin felt coated and sticky. But by the end of the day, we were back in a small village near the Bear Rescue Center, and it was good to be outside of the city again.

Wicket and me in our usual traveling spots: me in the front seat to avoid car sickness, and Wicket between my legs to avoid being bumped along too harshly in the back of the truck on the very bumpy roads.

Wicket in a crush cage at the Bear Rescue Center. When being “milked” for their bile, bears will spend weeks on end in these cages. The rounded bars on top are lowered over the bear, further compressing them in the cage.

This woman made my newly acquired “yaket”. Beautiful, heavy, and still smelling of yak and wood smoke, I was glad she was willing to sell it to me.

Wicket and I take a break and gaze over my new favorite place (photo K.Malcolm)

Wulan, the forest reserve worker, and Karl, listen to our guide for the day tell stories from the time his father led the Roosevelt’s on a Panda hunt in the 1920s.

Day 25: Our drive from Mianning to Meigu via Chinchi was reported to be six hours and actually was! I was starting to feel like a touring band. This was the eleventh place we spent the night since arriving in China. I started to fantasize pretty intensely about food. At the top of my list—salad.

Day 27: On our last day in the field, we finally worked in a cornfield, which is no Midwestern flat tract of land, but rather a patch-like quilt of tended fields which climbed up the mountainside. Since bears came in to raid the cornstalks of their treasure, there were piles of corn-filled scat to be found. Our last day corresponded with Middle Autumn Days, a three-day holiday and one of China’s most celebrated. A harvest celebration, it’s a very family-centric holiday, and many Chinese will travel home to enjoy meals with their loved ones. In addition to our usual festive eating and toasting with our Chinese co-workers, complete strangers noted that we were obviously far from our homes and came to our table to toast us and make us feel welcome. Sweet little cakes called moon cakes, filled with stiff fruit jellies, nuts, or meat, are shared among friends and acquaintances as gifts for Middle Autumn Days, and we were thoroughly plied with the dense little treats.

We ended our night with bellies full of barbeque and pockets full of moon cakes, a fitting end to a successful and adventure-filled project very much worth celebrating.

Wulan, Karl, Aimee, and Wicket finished after our last day of field work.

Days 28-30: It was three more days before Wicket and I landed back in the United States. The process of exporting Wicket out of China was fraught with confusion and difficulties. Wulan spent days getting paperwork in order and sweet-talking various officials and airline personnel, who were often confused, because people there don’t typically fly with dogs. We ended up getting a lot of help from a cargo shipping company, which had never flown a dog before but was a regular shipper of other precious cargo—they were currently arranging the return of a giant panda, which had been on loan to the San Diego Zoo.

As Karl boarded his plane to return home to Wisconsin, and Wulan was busy with our last minute departure arrangements, I finally had some time alone with my thoughts. Overall, we searched five reserves and Wicket found forty-one scats in four of them. Her contribution of finding scats in areas where previous searches yielded little would round out the impressive amount of data that this project had generated over the last three years. Never before had Wicket and I had the opportunity to interact with so many people while working; we worked with dozens of local reserve workers and converted many of them from skeptics to believers about the value of conservation dogs. Moreover, we met many more villagers and gave them an opportunity to meet a fearless, friendly, and engaged dog. I can’t even begin to recount the number of smiles that Wicket brought to the faces of those we met.

Personally, this month brought me a host of new friends and colleagues whose work and professionalism I admired, and whose good humor helped every day in this foreign land seem a wild adventure and all around good time. I learned to hand over control and trust others to get me to where I needed to be and to look out for me. And I had confirmed what I had long suspected—that I can eat just about anything.

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Ralls, K., S. Sharma, D.A. Smith, S. Bremner-Harrison, B. L. Cypher, and J.E. Maldonado. 2010. Changes in Kit Fox Defecation Patterns During the Reproductive Season: Implications for Noninvasive Surveys. Journal of Wildlife Management 74(7):1457-1462.

Parker, M. and A. Hurt. 2010. Canine Detection Teams and Conservation. In: K.H. Redford (ed), 2010-2011 State of the Wild: A Global Portrait (pp. 183-188). Island Press.

Bozarth, C.A., Y.R. Alva-Campbell, K. Ralls, T.R. Henry, D.A. Smith, M. F. Westphal, and J.E. Maldonado. 2010. An efficient noninvasive method for discriminating among faeces of sympatric North American canids. Conservation Genetics Resources 2:173-175. DOI 10.1007/s12686-010-9215-4

Hurt, A. and D.A. Smith. 2009. Conservation Dogs. In: Helton, W.S. (ed.), Canine Ergonomics: The Science of Working Dogs (pp. 175-194). CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Mackay, P., D.A. Smith, R. Long, and M. Parker. 2008. Scat Detection Dogs. In: Long, R., P. Mackay, J. Ray and W. Zielinski (eds.), Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores (pp. 183-222). Island Press.

Reindl-Thompson, S.A., J. Shivik, A. Whitelaw, A. Hurt, K. Higgins. 2006.
Efficacy of Scent Dogs in Detecting Black-Footed Ferrets at a Reintroduction Site in South Dakota.Wildlife Society Bulletin 34(5):1435–1439

Smith, D. A., K. Ralls, B. L. Cypher, H. O. Clark, Jr., P. A. Kelly, D. F. Williams, and J. E. Maldonado. 2006 a.Relative abundance of endangered San Joaquin kit foxes (Vulpes macrotis mutica) based on scat-detection dog surveys. Southwestern Naturalist 51:210-219

Smith, D. A., K. Ralls, A. Hurt, B. Adams, M. Parker, and J. E. Maldonado. 2006 b.
Assessing reliability of microsatellite genotypes from kit fox fecal samples using genetic and GIS analyses. Molecular Ecology 15:387-406

Smith, D. A., K. Ralls, B. L. Cypher, and J. E. Maldonado. 2005. Assessment of scat-detection dog surveys to determine kit fox distribution. Wildlife Society Bulletin 33:897-904

Ralls, K. and D.A. Smith. 2004. Latrine use by San Joaquin kit foxes (Vulpes macrotis mutica) and coyotes (Canis latrans).Western North American Naturalist 64:544-547

Smith, D., K. Ralls, A. Hurt, B. Adams, M. Parker, B. Davenport, M.C. Smith, and J.E. Maldonado. 2003. Detection and accuracy rates of dogs trained to find scats of San Joaquin kit foxes (Vulpes macrotis mutica). Animal Conservation 6:339-346

Smith D., K. Ralls, B. Davenport, B. Adams, and J.E. Maldonado. 2001. Canine assistants for conservationists. Science 291:435

Hurt A., B. Davenport and E. Greene. 2000.Training dogs to distinguish between black bear (Ursus americanus) and grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) feces. University of Montana Under-Graduate Biology Journal.

An overall decline in populations of rare and threatened species worldwide has generated the development of non-invasive wildlife surveying methods. These include: camera traps, hair snag stations, and the collection of fecal (scat) samples. Of these, scat samples offer a particular wealth of information about a species’ presence, relative abundance, food habits, parasite loads, habitat use and home range size. The hormones and DNA extracted from scats can provide insight on the sex and reproductive status of individuals, which in turn can be used to determine population size, home range, paternity, and kinship, information that is critical to the success of management and conservation initiatives.

It can be as daunting a task to locate the signs of elusive wildlife species (e.g. scat, urine, hair, dens) as it is to locate the animals themselves. This is especially the case in rugged terrain and with species that are nocturnal, cryptic, wide ranging or rare. In some cases, contact with people can pose a risk to the species under consideration. WDC places a high value on scientific integrity and has the best interests of wildlife species very much at heart. We maximize the efficiency of our searches, ensure the data collected is of the highest quality, and minimize contact with the animals themselves by pairing handlers, who are also biologists, with detection dogs specially trained to differentiate and locate the scat of target species. Our dog / handler teams are able to cover large areas without disturbing wildlife, livestock or domestic animals and without luring animals or changing their behavior, which can influence study results.

Over the past decade, our dogs have been trained to detect a variety of wildlife scat (ranging from grizzly, black and moon bear, wolf, cougar, kit fox, blunt-nosed leopard lizard to moose, wolverine and fisher), live wildlife (wolf snails, black-footed ferrets, brown tree snakes and desert tortoises). Our dogs have also been trained to rare and invasive plants (Kincaid’s lupine, spotted knapweed, Chinese bush clover and dyer’s woad) and have been part of a number of plant conservation and weed eradication programs.

WDC has taken a leading role in helping to expand the use of conservation dogs in wildlife and conservation research. We are always seeking new applications and partnerships with researchers, managers and conservation organizations worldwide.