Ursus, the Bird Dog - dogs help biologists study birds in Alaska

Animals, Nov, 1998 by Michelle Ahen

A canine field worker teams up with biologists to save a rare duck.

What's wet, brown, and slimy all over? The answer--a chocolate Labrador retriever at work on Alaska's mud-soaked Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

It is dawn. Paul Flint, his dog, and a team of researchers have set out from their field camp at Hock Slough. Clad in hip waders, the scientists stomp through boot-sucking mud as they explore the endless stretch of swamp that reaches west toward the Bering Sea. In places the slime is so deep it can swallow a man up to his waist. Ursus, Flint's chocolate Lab, is a part of the team. The canine colleague sloshes ahead of the group, sniffing the tall grass as he goes.

The scientists and their furry field-worker are in search of spectacled eider duck nests. The eiders used to flock to the delta in great numbers; during the 1970s about 100,000 came to breed here. But today their number has plummeted to merely 5,000 in all of western Alaska. Around Hock Slough, located on a 10.5-mile stretch of tidal tundra, spectacled eiders incubate their eggs on nests sequestered in tall reeds. The question is, How many nests and ducks are there? Flint and his crew are on a mission to find out.

The band disperses as each scientist begins to explore a staked-out territory. As Flint and his dog head east, Ursus catches a scent. He dashes across the marsh, sending splashes of muck in his wake. Suddenly a spectacled eider flushes from the grass and takes to the air. Score. Ursus has located the first nest of the morning. His task completed, the Lab lies down and waits for his partner. Flint marches through the bog until he reaches his assistant. While Ursus takes a siesta, Flint measures the nest, counts the eggs, and enters the data into a laptop computer. After 15 minutes the comrades are off. With 12 to 14 hours of work ahead of them, they will be dog-tired when the day is done.

For the past eight years, Ursus has qualified not only as man's best friend but possibly as man's best four-legged field assistant. Flint, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service researching spectacled eiders and other waterfowl, admits that tracking down nests on the delta's vast moors can be daunting. The duck nests, small mounds of grass, are often so well camouflaged that they can be extremely difficult to spot. Here Ursus's skills come in handy. The Lab not only is a first-rate bird sleuth; he can cover a large territory quicker than a man can dislodge his boot from a voracious morass of sludge.

"Dogs' sense of smell enables them to detect nests at great distances," explains Flint. "In addition to this, incubating female ducks respond to dogs from farther away than humans. A female on her eggs may let me walk right by the nest, as long as I don't look at her. But she will flush before a dog gets even close."

Throughout the afternoon the team continues to march across terrain that Flint describes as "flatter than a pancake." At one point they come to a creek, and Flint sends Ursus ahead to test the waters. The loyal long-legged scout begins to scamper across but then is forced to doggy-paddle. "We have a saying," Flint says with a grin: "`If Ursus swims, so do you!'" Flint calls Ursus back. The colleagues locate a shallower crossing, then push ahead on their wild-duck chase.

As the pair complete a sweep across a two-mile stretch, Ursus bolts off. After a time he returns with stakes that had been used to temporarily mark off the area. He presents them to Flint, tail wagging.

In addition to his retrieving and nest-hunting contributions, Ursus is a dear companion. In this remote corner of western Alaska, far from civilization, it is just biologists, birds, and miles of mud. Ursus helps make months of isolation much more tolerable.

Some years back Flint conducted research on northern pintails. The pintail populations had decreased in North America but remained stable on the delta. Flint set out to discover why. Then, too, Ursus was his right-hand dog. In order to look at the duckling survival rate, Flint needed to track down females wearing radio transmitters, count the number of ducklings per nest, study the birds' breeding biology, and consider whether some nests were more successful than others. But first he had to find the nests.

Searching for a pintail nest was like looking for a contact lens in a shag carpet. The ducks often seemed invisible, and indeed they were. Hens often leave their nests to feed three to four times a day. With no one at home, the nests were impossible to find. But Ursus was able to catch the scent of the nests even if the hens were not present. If a pintail was on a nest but had stashed its brood in the reeds, Ursus located the hidden youngsters. The dog's tracking skills helped to make the study far more complete.

Flint and Ursus's partnership began back in 1990. "The important thing to teach Ursus," says Flint, "was to forget the bird and go for the nest." After about two days of scolding if he chased a bird, and praise when he detected a nest, Ursus got the message. Nests were in. Chasing birds was out. Ursus was on his way to becoming Flint's top dog.