Uncommon Scents
For decades, search dogs have been used to sniff out narcotics and explosives and help find victims of earthquakes and floods. Now, they’re being used for conservation, searching for things such as salamanders, orchids and rare plants in Northern Arizona.
Featured in the October 2024 Issue of Arizona Highways
When all you have is a hammer, Abraham Maslow once noted, everything looks like a nail. Similarly, when all you have are a bunch of botanists, everything looks like a pediocactus.
That version might not be as universal as the original, but it’s particularly apt on an unseasonably hot morning in late May, as staffers from Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden comb a high-desert landscape south of the Grand Canyon in search of a plant that grows only in this part of Northern Arizona: the Fickeisen plains cactus (Pediocactus peeblesianus ssp. fickeiseniae). The botanists are hoping to get a better idea of how many of these endangered cactuses, familiarly known as “Ficks,” actually exist. They also want to collect seeds from as many as possible, which will allow the DBG to grow new cactuses in its lab and eventually augment the species’ numbers in the wild.
But first, they have to find them, and the Ficks don’t make it easy. They’re tiny — about the diameter of a quarter, and protruding an inch or two from the ground. They’re sparsely distributed, even here in their natural habitat. And unless they’re in bloom, they blend in with other cactuses, rocks, grass and everything else on the desert floor. Human sight is good for a lot of things, but here, it’s woefully inadequate.
That’s where Circe, an energetic and talkative black Labrador retriever, and Muon, a smallish Belgian Malinois, come in. In 2022, the DBG began working with a California-based company that trains scent detection dogs for use in wildlife management and other projects. This is the dogs’ second project assisting the DBG, and the partnership is believed to be the first time dogs have been used in Arizona to find and catalog endangered plants. Steve Blackwell, the DBG’s conservation collections manager, says the dogs provide a lot of value, and not just by virtue of their sensitive snouts.
“It’s not only what they do in the field; it’s what they can do to get people to understand the plight of these plants,” he says. “A lot of times, people are more zoocentric — they care more about animals. If I can hook them with the dogs, that’s a great way to get them into plant conservation.”
