A nine-month-old puppy called Zorro was flown in from Tasmania to the University of the Sunshine Coast last week to learn the art of finding owl vomit.
Zorro’s bootcamp was booked by researchers from The Australian National University’s Difficult Bird Research Group, led by Dr Dejan Stojanovic, who crowdfunded more than $60,000 to get Zorro ready for the job.
They want him to detect masked owls, which are endangered in Tasmania and are difficult to find, in order to learn more about what they need to survive.
USC Detection Dogs for Conservation project manager Dr Romane Cristescu said this was the first time her team had been asked to help train a dog to detect owl pellets (regurgitated indigestible parts of prey on the forest floor), however the team’s work in detecting other animals have included 3000 searches for a variety of conservation projects for koalas and quolls since 2011.
“At the moment it is about making a fun game about finding a target scent so we are just playing a lot and finding smelly things. He’s berserk about the game so he’s doing really well,” Dr Cristescu said.
She said Zorro – a border collie springer spaniel or “sprollie” – was also learning quickly from USC’s star sniffers, Maya, 12, and Baxter, 5.
“He’s quite in love and proud to be part of the club, so it seems old dogs can teach new dogs new tricks,” she said.
The other side of his training is to acclimatise him to other animals, so he’s living with cats and chickens.
“We’re training him to think all chickens and other animals are boring and that the specific target scents are the most exciting thing and will lead to lots of fun times.
Zorro will spend 10 days in intensive training before going home to Tasmania to continue practise. After that, the USC team will visit Tasmania to conduct field trials with Zorro, in the hope of deploying him for real fieldwork searching for Tasmanian masked owls before the end of the year.
