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| photo courtesy of TNC and WD4C |
Meet “Moose” a hard-working canine with the nonprofit organization Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C).
Moose recently completed a tour of duty on Santa Cruz Island as part of a multi-organizational effort to find a better way to gather information on island spotted skunks.
Island spotted skunks only live on Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands. As island foxes recovered on these islands, island spotted skunks seemed to have declined. There is concern for these rare little skunks and a lack of understanding about their relationship with island foxes. Do island foxes directly impact island spotted skunks? Do they compete for similar resources?
Friends of the Island Fox has supported several research investigations into this relationship:
In 2024, the question arose about western spotted skunks in captivity that might participate in research studies as a control for island spotted skunks. FIF’s Education Director, Keri Dearborn, did an internet search and found “Boo” a female western spotted skunk at the Sequoia Park Zoo. Boo and her two brothers had been orphaned when they were very young. Though they were rescued, they became imprinted on humans and couldn’t be returned to the wild. Boo was living at the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka and her two brothers were at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park near Redding.
While Thomaier’s field cameras have documented island spotted skunks, to-date identifying individual skunks in images has been very difficult. Island spotted skunks push off radio collars and typically avoid capture.
Lara Brenner, Island Scientist with The Nature Conservancy, had been working with a conservation dog to sniff out invasive Argentine ant colonies on Santa Cruz Island. Could a conservation working dog locate island spotted skunk dens? Finding scat and dens would be less invasive than capturing skunks and might open up a whole new way to determine their numbers.
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| Moose gets suited up for work |
Moose had experience tracking grizzly bears and locating their dens. Could he do the same job for tiny island spotted skunks? Protocol for a test was put in place. Because island foxes are susceptible to canine diseases and because island foxes can be a source of disease for dogs, Moose was up-to-date on all of his vaccinations.
The two zoos collected soiled bedding and feces from the three western spotted skunks. The fragrant material was sent to a WD4C training location in Montana, where Moose learned to identify spotted skunk scent. Would the western spotted skunk scent be close enough to the island spotted skunk scent for Moose to be successful?
Toward the end of 2024, Moose and his handler traveled to Santa Cruz Island. Moose “hit the ground running,” Brenner says. As a conservation working dog, he wears a special harness with bells and a GPS locator. Brenner explains that the GPS locator “is so that we can record his tracks and understand [his] search effort… i.e. how far does Moose have to go and how long does he have to sniff before he finds a skunk?”
On the first day, Moose signaled his handler that he’d found an island spotted skunk den.
Working the hillsides with a canine nose, detection dogs are more efficient than people and have a higher success rate locating a target species. Over three weeks, Moose found several den sites, including this one with an island spotted skunk at home, and 12 scats.
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| Island spotted skunk in den (courtesy of TNC) |
Can DNA from the scats identify individual island spotted skunks? Can genetic meta-barcoding of scat samples identify specific dietary items for island spotted skunks and island foxes? We’re just at the tip of learning how working dogs like Moose can contribute to island conservation?
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| courtesy of TNC and WD4C |
This project is a multi-institutional collaboration between Sequoia Park Zoo, Turtle Bay Exploration Park, The Nature Conservancy, Working Dogs for Conservation, and Friends of the Island Fox. The biggest credit goes to the four-footed collaborators: the three western spotted skunks who are helping their wild counterparts and a very talented working dog named Moose.
