Morgan O'Hanlon 00:00

You're listening to Season Two of Better Outside, a Texas Parks and Wildlife production. This season was brought to you by Minkota and Hummingbird, Minkota fishing products built to outlast, and Humminbird making every cast count. I'm your host, Morgan O'Hanlon,

David Yoskowitz 00:17

and I'm David Yoskowitz, Executive Director of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Morgan O'Hanlon 00:22

In this episode, we're taking you to Big Bend Ranch State Park, where we'll meet two fuzzy friends, a dog and a cactus.

David Yoskowitz 00:30

Morgan, I'm not sure I describe as cactus as fuzzy - that doesn't sound right,

Morgan O'Hanlon 00:35

you know? Maybe that's fair. I might have gotten poked by one or two, but at least this one is pretty cute, and we'll introduce it to you right after this break. Season two of Better Outside is brought to you by Minkota, built to fish in Hummingbird, making every cast count simply clearly better. When you pair the Hummingbird fish finder with a Minn Kota trolling motor, you'll have the brains and brawn to dominate the water. David, do you have any dogs at home?

David Yoskowitz 01:10

I do currently have a dog at home, a long-haired dachshund, very stubborn, likes to do things her way, but she's adorable.

Morgan O'Hanlon 01:18

What's her name?

David Yoskowitz 01:19

Lola.

Morgan O'Hanlon 01:20

And how well trained is Lola?

David Yoskowitz 01:23

Well, Lola's a dachshund, and when you have a dachshund, stubbornness comes with it. So she's trained enough to, when she knows she's gonna get a treat, she'll do something.

Morgan O'Hanlon 01:34

Short but

David Yoskowitz 01:35

fierce, short but fierce. Yeah,

Morgan O'Hanlon 01:37

did you know that any sort of dog, pretty much, can be trained for many sophisticated purposes.

David Yoskowitz 01:44

Well, I know that dogs are used for all sorts of conservation purposes. In fact, I remember during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill out in the Gulf, dogs were used to detect oil in seafood. So, I know some of our own staff at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department have trained them for all kinds of animal scat scents and poacher tracks earlier this season. I know we talked about Izzy, one of our canine dogs that works with our game wardens, but there are other detection dog programs, such as Gertie the bee dog and the handler Jacqueline Stob searching for bumblebee nests, San Antonio Zoo's Horn Lizard Detection Dogs program in Texas Tech's zebra mussel detection dogs, so there's there's a lot that's happening out there with conservation dogs.

Morgan O'Hanlon 02:29

What if I told you that one of our biologists here at the department is using dogs to find cacti?

David Yoskowitz 02:35

I can't say I'd be surprised. I know detection dogs can sniff out just about anything, but do cacti really have a smell?

Morgan O'Hanlon 02:45

You know, surprisingly, or at least to me, they do. I thought that the only stinky type of flowers or beautiful smelling flowers would be roses or something like the corpse flower that you see in zoos, and that sort of thing, but it turns out all plants have smells, and even the faintest waft of a cactus dogs can pick up.

David Yoskowitz 03:09

I don't think I plan to go around sniffing plants out, especially cacti, but I'm excited to hear your report about what these dogs are doing for an incredibly important cactus species here in Texas.

Morgan O'Hanlon 03:22

Well, David, if you're ready for it, I think it's time to go outside and start smelling some plants, you

Speaker 1 03:58

What time is it? Does anybody know? I, God knows. I hope my phone is in here somewhere.

Speaker 2 04:03

It is 620

Morgan O'Hanlon 04:07

It's pitch black outside as I prepare to hike into Big Bend Ranch State Park with a dog, his trainer, and a botanist who studies rare plants. Are

Speaker 2 04:15

we running late already?

Speaker 1 04:17

Probably, okay. One

Morgan O'Hanlon 04:22

of the women you just heard is Amy Hertz, a trainer with Working Dogs for Conservation.

Speaker 1 04:28

We're a nonprofit organization that trains detection dogs for conservation purposes. Their expertise is learning new targets fairly quickly, over for a matter of weeks, and then deploying to work on those targets. The

Morgan O'Hanlon 04:45

dog she's working with today is named Fenton.

Speaker 1 04:48

Okay, Fenton. Yeah, let's find it. Fenton is an eight year old, like Border Collie Aussie mini Aussie sort of mix. He's about 40 pounds, kind of tall for that weight, maybe taller than you'd expect. His legs are a little long. Some people describe him as brown, and some people describe him as gray, and he's definitely spotted, but not like a Dalmatian spotted. And then his most notable feature is one of his eyes is half blue, so when he looks at you, it has that kind of piercing quality. He's really unique to look at,

Morgan O'Hanlon 05:30

and right now he's learning to identify a rare cactus called the Mariposa.

Speaker 1 05:34

Hey, nose down, please check the

Morgan O'Hanlon 05:40

cactus is of special interest to the botanist who's out here with us today. Her name is Anna Strong, and here she is to tell us more.

Speaker 2 05:49

So, its scientific name is Sclero Cactus merito census. The Big Bend region is the only place you can find it in Texas. It's been estimated that there are upwards of a million, but when this plant was listed, we were looking at 1000s at that particular time.

Morgan O'Hanlon 06:09

She's studying the Mariposa distribution to get a better idea of its prevalence in the region, but the Mariposa isn't easy to find. That's why Strong is collaborating with working dogs for conservation, dogs can find tiny targets like the Mariposa cactus much easier than people, thanks to their powerful noses. Strong hopes that Fenton's nose can help her sniff out the cacti.

Speaker 2 06:32

It's a small cactus. A general, an average cactus would be about a golf ball to softball size. It is completely covered in spines, so you don't see the green stem of the cactus at all. You see mostly this gray color of spines covering the entire cactus. It looks a lot like the gray limestone that it lives on, so it can be pretty hard to find sometimes. In February, you'll find them with flowers on it, and the flowers don't necessarily make it easier to find, because the flowers are white.

Morgan O'Hanlon 07:15

Its small size and gray color easily blend into the desert floor. It doesn't help that there are about four or five other cocta in the Big Bend region that look similar,

Speaker 1 07:25

not that one.

Morgan O'Hanlon 07:26

Even so, Fenton is doing really well so far.

Speaker 1 07:31

I'm liking his speed. It's not too fast, he's zigzagging. She's called quartering to the left and right of the trail. His nose is down a lot, so I like the search behavior.

Morgan O'Hanlon 07:46

When Fenton finds a Mariposa cactus, his trainer throws them a tennis ball for positive reinforcement.

Speaker 1 07:52

Easy shall we sit? Yes, yeah, good job, good job, good job. I'll get some treats out and trade you. I

Morgan O'Hanlon 08:04

don't think I've ever seen a dog this toy crazy.

Speaker 1 08:09

Fancy right here.

Morgan O'Hanlon 08:10

It turns out that's by design.

Speaker 1 08:13

The dogs are all these toy crazy dogs, and they learn that if you smell this thing that you don't necessarily, you're not bred to care about. In this case, we're looking for a cactus, and there's no dog that inherently cares about finding a cactus. Then you get food or a toy reward, and then that's really meaningful for them.

Morgan O'Hanlon 08:37

After Fenton found his fair share of cacti, I sat down with Amy to learn more about conservation dogs. What type of species does working dogs for conservation normally work with?

Speaker 1 08:49

We work with threatened and endangered species, invasive species, trafficked species. We have anti-trafficking work in Africa, mostly. There's about 100 different targets that we've trained dogs to find. It can be anything. Everything has an odor, so it's, you know, what's what's your question? What do you need to find? You can't do anything. You can't manage a population. You can't know how many animals are in a population. You can't know if you have an invasive species in the area until you can find it. All of that work is kind of a needle in a haystack search. If people are searching for something that they can find easily visually, they don't usually call

Morgan O'Hanlon 09:35

us. Is it new or unusual for you guys to be working with plants?

Speaker 1 09:41

This is somewhere like the 12th or 13th or 14th plant that we found. It's been good to be 20 years ago that we worked with our first plant, working with this cactus. There's a visual component to it, because a cactus does look different. Than rocks and other things on the landscape, the dog is still primarily using scent, but we can see the dog sometimes catch sight of a cactus and go, "Oh, I better go sniff that closely. I see a cactus, and so that's different than some other plants we've worked on that are just green leafy plants growing among green leafy plants, and there's no visual component, so they just respond entirely by scent.

Morgan O'Hanlon 10:28

When I think of plants, I guess I think about a flower as having smell, but I don't really think about what if the plant doesn't have a flower. Do the other parts of the plant have smells as well?

Speaker 1 10:40

Yeah, all the parts have scent, and that, that's really cool for me. I think plant work is my favorite because of that, especially in a world of plants. Now, in the desert, you have some non-planty areas in between plants, but mostly, like, our world is so full of plants, and so many, when we smell them, just smell green. I always would say, like, you know, just like a general, like, grassy smell, but yesterday Anna said green, and I was like, that's that's better. So they do, yeah, the, the plants, all plants smell distinct, they're different parts, like the root and the stems and the leaves, and if it's flowering, those can all smell kind of different,

Morgan O'Hanlon 11:22

so I've heard of cadaver dogs. I've heard of Frida, the dog in Mexico City, that sniffed out people after the earthquakes a few years ago. I am familiar with the fact that dogs have way better senses of smell than people. Why are dogs so well suited to this? And how well suited are they?

Speaker 1 11:42

They have really different physical anatomy, so you know, their noses, their snouts being longer. That's actually, you know, it's coated with cells meant for scenting, for sniffing. They have more scent receptor cells than we do, and then they can actually breathe, you know, for the sake of living, can be discoupled from scenting, right? So they can keep sniffing while they're breathing. That said, when they get really close to something, they have to, they close their mouth, so they can give it a good sniff to actually get right to source. And then their brain is also, they have a huge component of their brain that's dedicated to processing olfactory input, as opposed to ours, is it's much smaller.

Morgan O'Hanlon 12:27

Do you and the dogs have a personal relationship?

Speaker 1 12:31

Yeah, we have a personal relationship. It doesn't work if you don't. I think the motivation for the dog and the person would be really minimal if it wasn't about a relationship, the dogs are working to get their toy and get a reward, but it is also about they can't only like that, they have to like the search, they have to like the engagement with their person, and so it is about the teamwork and the bond you develop together, and it's especially, you know, when things are tricky, difficult to learn, and frankly, most of what conservation dogs work on is difficult to learn, because, like I said, it's a needle in the haystack, and there's just inherent challenges to all of the targets, and so it's part of that relationship, and being able to read each other and enjoy each other, and like persevere together, that helps get through some of that challenge, and the monotony when they're initially learning the game. It's a lot of repetitions in order to understand that odor and differentiate it from other odors, and so the relationship is all part of it.

Morgan O'Hanlon 13:51

Minkota trolling motors are built to deliver dependability for bay boats and skiffs, season after season, so you can own your spot and stay locked in to the moments that matter. For over 40 years, Humminbird has operated with one goal in mind: create difference-making days for anglers out on the water, day after day, year after year. They've done just that. It's no wonder they've become America's favorite fish finder. When you pair the Hummingbird fish finder with a Minn Kota trolling motor. You'll have the brains and broad to dominate the water. After spending a couple of long mornings out in the desert, I wanted to learn more about the cactus that brought us out there. I sat down with Anna Strong.

Speaker 2 14:39

I am Anna Strong. I am a botanist for Texas Parks and Wildlife, and I work at the Non Game and Rare Species program.

Morgan O'Hanlon 14:48

So, you mentioned that you only work with rare species, so we know right off the bat that this is a pretty unique, uncommon cactus. But what is special about it? Why? Are you studying it

Speaker 2 15:01

well? First off, it's a federally listed cactus, so yeah, since I work on rare species, but I don't - I kind of don't like questions like why is a species special, or what is it good for, because it presupposes that there are unspecial or useless species in general, I mean, there's certainly species that we humans haven't found a use for yet, or that we find annoying, like mosquitoes, maybe we fear them, or we have some sort of, I mean, no, not interested in all, but I guess you know from the plant's perspective, I find it kind of offensive. I want to say, well, what's so special about humans? Why are we so amazing? I think that's a great point. You know, it's like nothing else could be as important as we.. yeah. So, anyways, beyond that, I mean, you know, generally speaking, the more species in a particular area, the healthier the ecosystem is in that area, the more resilient it is to change in the environment. Different species have different roles, so if one gets taken out, maybe another can fill its place. So, you know, if you're a species that's really good at consuming dead things, it's good for the ecosystem to have another thing that can consume dead things. If that particular organism gets taken out, for example, with Mariposa cactus in particular, though it's one of the only species that's blooming in February, it blooms really early, and so it's providing nutrients for those early pollinators that are also out at that time. So, without that nutrient source for those pollinators, there obviously would be fewer options for the pollinators to obtain the nutrients, and if there are fewer bees, because they don't have nutrients, then there might be fewer whatever is eating the bees, bears for example, eat bees, so it's basically a cascading effect on the whole system.

Morgan O'Hanlon 17:11

So, like we were saying earlier, this is a rare plant. Was it not rare at one time? Is there anything that caused it to become a an endangered or threatened species,

Speaker 2 17:24

so when it was listed in 1979 it was only known from more or less three locations north of Blackout Wildlife Management Area and within Pigment National Park. So at the time it was listed, it was only known from those three locations, and on top of that, cactus lovers of the day had observed that there were cactus stickers, cactus collectors that were heavily collecting and impacting the cactus, probably all the species, not just Mariposa cactus in the area, and so they were finding literally piles of 1000s of cacti that had been left on the ground, probably accidentally, but it was a picture, probably a small representation of what may have been happening throughout the whole region at the time, where people would come and collect them and then sell them, so sort of with those two factors that I'm just guessing, but with the known populations at the time, and the threat of collection, the Fish and Wildlife Service felt like it was important enough to list

Morgan O'Hanlon 18:36

a quick tangent. After I talked with Anna, I called up someone who's sort of an expert in poaching.

Speaker 3 18:42

My name is Kevin Winters, Assistant Commander, Game Warden. Poaching, we think of it, and we think of wildlife, right, where people illegally take those resources from us, but a lot of times we forget that that also includes a lot of our native plants that we have here in the state of Texas.

Morgan O'Hanlon 18:59

As for the poachers themselves,

Speaker 3 19:01

they're mainly motivated by convenience, right? They're very small, they're easy to dig, they're easy to conceal and transport, and a lot of times people don't know what they're looking at, and there's the ability to make profit off these cactus, you know. It's very sparse country out there, and there has been multiple cases where there has been significant amount of cactus that has been taken without permission from the state and or federal property that had been taken to be sold in the black market, you know, we had one a few years back that we worked in conjunction with US Fish and Wildlife, that I think the individual within a short period of time was able to sell some living rock cactus and make close to almost $300,000 in a few months, it's a rarity, right? And when there's a rarity of an item that there's not a lot of, it creates this market. It's very rare when we do run into these situations, and we have these encounters.

Morgan O'Hanlon 19:52

Tell me more about why you ended up wanting to bring the dogs into working with you on this research. How did the dogs help out?

Speaker 2 20:00

Cacti are not really known to have much of an odor to humans, so it was kind of a test for detection dogs and their abilities to look for rare plants, but also helped me find more sites of the cactus, but it requires a lot of time and effort walking up and down steep talus limestone slope, and it can be very tiresome, and it can be somewhat dangerous, because the slope is pretty steep in some areas, and so I was just looking for another way to decrease the wear and tear on my own body, and knowing that I'm not going to have my knees all my life at this rate, I decided that using any other tool in the toolbox was a good one. I mean, you know, with plants you have to go to them, you can't trap them and come back and find them in a trap. I mean, I can tell you that for me directly, the dogs provide me joy when I'm out in the field with them, so I was thinking in terms of other people that are maybe less interested in plants that they might really love dogs, just sort of maybe a gateway drug to learning about other organisms that are maybe less showy and charismatic than a dog is. I think a lot of people can see the joy that plants bring me, and so if it's a person to person, that sometimes that can be infectious, and so maybe there's something there too that the combination of, hey, this is a really cool project. Look at how crazy fun those dogs are, but look at the tiny, cute cactus. You know that maybe you can get people to say, hey, wow, maybe I should learn more about the cactus,

Morgan O'Hanlon 22:02

Dave. David. Before I came to work at Texas Parks and Wildlife, I never really thought so much about TPWD scientists working with plants, you know. We've got Texas, of course, in our name, Parks and Wildlife, but not the word plants explicitly. At least when I think of the word wildlife, I tend to think about big fauna like ocelots and bears and snakes, and not so much about cacti and bushes. Do you think that's a pretty common perception?

David Yoskowitz 22:33

I think that can get lost in the conversation, right, that you know we're talking about parks, we're talking about wildlife, we're talking about the things that are on two or four feet, but what's critical to all that is the habitats that that wildlife lives in, so it could be grasses, trees, cacti, shrubs, and you know, a really important part of the work that the department does is to not only steward the wildlife, the fauna, but also to steward the flora of Texas. Those are public trust resources, and we have with our partners around the state the expertise to make sure that we're protecting it, that we're conserving, that we're making it available to all the critters that rely on that habitat, so the cacti included, and you know, really, it's great to hear that we have dogs out there, such as in this episode of the podcast, to search out those critically important species of cacti.

Morgan O'Hanlon 23:35

So, tell me more about what TPWD does for plants in particular.

David Yoskowitz 23:41

Well, first off, what's really critically important is working with private landowners. I mean, a majority of the land in the state is held in private hands, and they are working with the department and other partners are critically important stewards of that habitat, and so being of service to those landowners is really important in the, and the wildlife team, and the inland fisheries team, coastal fisheries team, and our game wardens themselves continually interacting with those private landowners to be of service to them. What the department also does is bring great expertise in habitat restoration. We have a native species database that we have available to individuals to look at our Texas natural diversity database, and then just a lot of education and outreach, not only to those that are stewards of the lands, but those that live in large cities, and really should know about the importance of protecting our natural habitats,

Morgan O'Hanlon 24:40

and all this work, do you think this is just as important as all of the work we do for wildlife,

David Yoskowitz 24:47

Morgan? Just as important as the large fauna species, the large animals and the small animals that we steward is the habitats that they live in. It's important that. We recognize the place of those grasses and those flowers and those shrubs and forbs and cacti as part of the landscape, as part of what makes Texas Texas. I mean, we're fortunate right now to be recording this as the wildflowers are really coming out after some much needed rains, and that's what makes Texas so special, as well as to drive up and down these roads, see those wildflowers, but those wildflowers serve a purpose too. They're beautiful to look at, but they're also critically important for the pollinators as they're starting to move through the countryside, right? They're important for species to browse on as well. You know, all of this comes together as part of an ecosystem, and we humans are as critical part of that ecosystem as all the animals and the habitats that they live in, and we have the opportunity to steward those habitats, you

Morgan O'Hanlon 26:08

You've been listening to season two of Better Outside, a Texas Parks and Wildlife production. This season is brought to you by Min Kota and Hummingbird. This episode was written and recorded by me, Morgan O'Hanlon story edited by Wes Ferguson and Aislin Gaddis for free-range productions. Audio production and sound design by Austin Sisler at Eastside Studios in Austin, Texas. Our theme song was written and recorded by Walker Lukens and Grant Nettley. Artwork for the show is by Aaron Zachary. You can find Better Outside on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or head Better outside.com where you can find show notes, photos, more great stories from the Texas outdoors. If you like Better Outside, you can find more work by me and other outdoors writers at TPW magazine.com that's Texas Polecat waco.com and you can support us by subscribing to the magazine for only $2 a month. That's all for this episode. See y'all next time, and thanks for joining