As the One Ear wolf pack establishes itself near his family's four-generation cattle ranch in North Park, Colorado, Adam VanValkenburg reckons he has spent hundreds of hours this summer just moving game cameras to work out where the wolves are — before counting the hours spent on non-lethal deterrents. That is the gap a pilot called 'Project Scout' hopes a dog can fill, The Fence Post reports.

For ten days in August, Charley, a nine-year-old Labrador trained by Montana-based Working Dogs for Conservation to tell wolf, coyote and bear scat apart, worked the ranch as the first test of a concept from the nonprofit and Wild Ranch, founded by Fraser resident Chip Isenhart to try new tools against wolf–livestock conflict. The idea — named for a rancher's dog killed by wolves — is 'odor landscape mapping': using a detection dog's behaviour to find travel corridors, scent-marking sites, landscape funnels, fence crossings and areas of repeated use, so deterrents can be aimed where wolves actually move.

'This season was so difficult to figure out up in North Park,' Isenhart said; the pack had new den and rendezvous sites and its travel paths could not be found, and the coarse location data Colorado Parks and Wildlife shares is like 'reading tea leaves'. Charley carried a phone and tracker, and afterwards, VanValkenburg said, 'we were able to pull up the map and follow the hot spots where he showed the most interest and were able to focus on those areas with deterrents and human presence' — while also alerting to coyote scat and years-old bear scat in the timber. Jes Lefcourt of the wildlife-data firm Earth Ranger set up the mapping side.

The Rocky Mountain Wolf Project, which led the reintroduction ballot measure and has funded Wild Ranch with two grants, was on site; board chair Courtney Vail called it 'the power and potential of a new tool' and said that having helped bring wolves to the state, 'we bear the obligation to support ranchers during this transition'. Open questions include whether the method scales to large landscapes, what training and breeds work best, and how it fits other prevention programmes.

The ranch has seen wolves since 2020, before the December 2023 reintroduction, and its cattle summer at 10,000 feet in dense timber; with Wild Ranch it has also tried AI camera traps that trigger solar-powered 'RAD box' scare devices and biometric cattle tags that flag predator behaviour. 'It doesn't replace anything; it's not a silver bullet,' Isenhart said of the dog work, 'but it does help increase the efficiency and the utility of these other tools' — and, VanValkenburg added, lets range riders spend their time hazing wolves rather than hunting for their trails.

Source: The Fence Post