Conservation Dogs staff visit Working Dogs for Conservation in Montana

We are delighted to be invited to Montana to visit Megan Parker of Working Dogs for Conservation, and to shadow her on her week long operational search at the end of July.

http://www.workingdogsforconservation.org/

We are more than thrilled to be given this opportunity to see how WDC work and Conservation Dogs aspire to work along side WDC sometime in the future.

"Working Dogs for Conservation (WDC) formed in 2000 to collect information-rich wildlife and plant samples using specially trained detection dogs."

Megan Parker has been involved with dogs in Conservation since 1996, as well as having life long experience training dogs for obedience and Search and Rescue.

They have been working in this field for over ten years now and have so much knowledge and experience and I cant wait to speak to them and pick their brains about what they do, why, troubleshooting and prospects for the future.

I would love to invite Working Dogs for Conservation to the UK to visit our training establishment, see our dogs.  We hope for them to visit us next time they are in the UK.

We will be staying at Red Rock Wildlife Refuge in Montana during the search period, as well as staying with Megan at her home in Montana.

On our visit we hope to Visit Yellowstone park also to see all the wildlife.

But mostly on this visit I cant wait to see WDC dogs, I love meeting new dog especially ones that are in tune with there own senses and use them so productively to help us humans gain a better informed understanding of wildlife and the world... we owe it to the dogs..

check out WDC Dogs:- http://www.workingdogsforconservation.org/feat/

On our return we will keep you updated on the searches that where conducted and for animal scats we where in search for during the week long search in the beautiful settings.

June In a Nutshell

June has been an interesting and exciting month

 Firstly Conservation Dogs staff attended a Mammal society Course:

Non Invasive Survey Methods for Mammal Ecology

at Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland which was run by

Dr Pete Turner and Dr Catherine Turner.

It was a very interesting and enjoyable course from learning about DNA Sequencing to having hands on experience placing :-

-Hair traps out,

-Small mammal pots for dropping collections

 -Placing Camera traps out.

A Hair Tube being assembled and positioned

Sticky tape placed inside the Tube, as well as a chicken leg placed securely inside the tube.

Hair Samples collected.

Peanut Butter used for the small mammal pots.

Droppings collected the day after in the small mammal pots.

Squirrel Hair Tube set out with selection of nuts.

I met many amazing and interesting people on the course that where working and experienced Ecologist from all over the UK like Cheshire, Worcester and Nottingham, everyone was so friendly and fortunately they all showed a great positive interest in the work Conservation dogs do.

 And I hope to work with several of them in the future, by either going along on their bat surveys and Great Crested Newt surveys or carrying out a demonstration of our Bat Carcass detection dog for a Bat Conservation Group later in the year.

(Group Photo June 5th 2011)

I want to say thank you to Pete Turner for all his help in training Luna our Pine Marten dog. He has been so helpful with helping to supply Pine Marten scats and to also help with ideas to push Conservation dogs into new projects and other interesting prospects.