Marbled Murrelet Project
Date:
Details:
June 2022
PROOF OF CONCEPT PROJECT
The National Park Service for the State and National Parks Redwoods in California hired Dogs with Jobs for a 10 day experiment to see if we could train dogs to find hatched Marbled Murrelet eggs.
Using trained canines to find Marbled Murrelet eggs had never been tried before, so they had very low expectations that we would be successful, especially since we didn’t even have Marbled Murrelet eggs to train the dogs on in the first place.
Dogs with Jobs was up for the challenge!
The goal of the study was to see if we could find the hatched eggs, and therefore, locate the nests that are in old growth redwoods approximately 250 feet up.
Marbled Murrelets only lay one egg, so we had to be near the correct tree at the exact time that the egg shells the were kicked out of the nest.
Success!
Our trained Dogs with Jobs canines found two Marbled Murrelet eggs in this 10 day experiment! Considering there had only been 25 Marbled Murrelet egg shells ever found in the last 10 years, this was a great achievement for all of us!
Dogs with Jobs was the first in the world to train dogs to find Marbled Murrelet eggs!
