NEW MISSION FOR WINK THE ONE-EYED CONSERVATION DOG WITH A NOSE FOR WEEDS

A successful sniffer dog has been given a new mission, if he chooses to accept it.

Wink, a one-eyed collie from Invercargill, will be undertaking a three-month training programme to learn to detect African love grass, after several years helping eradicate pesky spartina from Canterbury shores.

He and trainer John Taylor will be contracted to Environment Canterbury (ECan) as part of the council’s new early-intervention biosecurity approach.

Taylor said he was about a month and a half into Wink’s training, and it was going well so far.

“I started by presenting him with a piece of the plant material, and I told him to sit. I then rewarded him when he sat after sniffing [it]… That’s the basis of all the training.”

He then moved on to glass jars with holes in the lid, with the plant inside one of them.

They would be hidden inside concrete blocks, and Wink would be taught to put his head inside to smell them, and to alert them when he found the right jar.

The training then moved outside, with the jar hidden under shrubs. Taylor said he was then taught to “speak” when he found it.

“Around the end of the coming month we’ll go down to Omakau for his first field trip, to a known site. If it goes well and he’s finding the real McCoy, it’ll be an ongoing thing.”

It is the fourth weed the four-year-old has been taught to find, Taylor said.

Wink – he lost an eye at five months after developing an ulcer – not only spent years sniffing out spartina but learned to find velvetleaf in Waikato, and successfully completed trials for the Ministry of Primary Industries to prove dogs could detect Manchurian wild rice.

“I’m just really lucky I’ve got a really smart dog. He’s just one of those exceptional dogs you find every now and then,” Taylor said.

ECan’s principal biosecurity adviser Laurence Smith said while scent detection dogs like Wink saw work such as this as a fun game, they were an increasingly important part of pest surveillance programmes.

“Wink is already an expert at sniffing out spartina grass, and we are thrilled that John has agreed to train him to detect African love grass.

“Once the training has been completed, John and Wink will join Environment Canterbury biosecurity officers to search for the pest across our region.”

“They will focus on land where there are known infestations to help identify if it’s spread, and also at sites where the pest isn’t currently found, but there’s a high-risk of it emerging under favourable conditions,”

African love grass is a quick-growing weed which can cause significant damage to the environment.

It tolerates fires, droughts, frosts, and poor soil, and rapidly invades bare land. It then forms dense stands, which prevent native species growing through.

The grass was found throughout South Canterbury hill country, but has also been spotted on a roadside in North Canterbury, according to ECan.

“It’s crucial for the control on the plant that we actively assume it could occur in areas outside these known locations.”

Wink is also part of the Department of Conservation’s spartina control programme.

Spartina was first introduced to New Zealand in 1913 to stabilise estuaries and river banks.

But its dense, sediment-trapping clumps became a huge problem, and the plant colonised so quickly it could turn estuaries to grasslands in just a few years.

Its eradication was at one stage thought to be almost impossible, but with Wink’s help more than a hundred patches of spartina were sniffed out and dug up across the Greater Christchurch area before they had the chance to take over.