It’s barely dawn in Pacifica, and the pack scouts through thick coastal fog. Eyes aren’t much help here—a speeding cyclist is barely dodged—but the leader’s nose keeps the group on track. His snout juts forward, stays low to the ground. Some seconds pass as DJ, Belgian Malinois and star sleuth, ruminates on the quality and direction of a scent. As soon as he’s sure, he’s off.
Alys Granados, wildlife ecologist at the Bay Area Puma Project, waits calmly on the trail for a go-ahead with the rest of DJ’s coworkers. Any excitement from them could add to the pile of red herrings—wind, competing scents, fallen logs—that DJ has to sort through to locate mountain lion excrement, aka scat. A bright orange harness and bell streak a trail of color and sound to help the less scent-savvy follow him. Into the woods, out of the woods. “He’s like this river of nose, running back and forth, looking for samples,” says Karen DeMatteo, a biologist and conservation dog trainer. DJ’s bell alerts wildlife to steer clear, too. Not that anything could distract this dog on the job. “Rabbits running under his nose, he could care less. The poop is up ahead—and that’s what matters to him.”
Once scat is spotted, the humans get to work. Granados, sometimes with volunteers and sometimes without, separates a sample into four pieces, often revealing tiny bones or deer fur. Each goes into a ziplock for freezing or a paper bag for dehydration and will wind up at one of four different labs, where the sample gets tested for parasites, cortisol (a stress marker), genetics, or heavy metals. Puma populations from the Bay Area to Southern California are candidates for a state endangered species listing. They’re likely weakened by inbreeding and hence less able to fight off parasitic infections like toxoplasmosis, which is spread by stray and pet cats. Studies suggest pumas near urban areas are sicker and more stressed, and Granados wants to know if that holds true in the Bay Area. “But we’ll see later on,” she says, “what the scat says.” It’ll help inform how humans, their pets, and wildlife can get along.
Answers require scat; finding it requires a conservation detection dog. “If we’re looking for scat on a trail, then maybe we can find it,” Granados says. That’s if the scat is fresh, and it hasn’t been trampled already. Once, DeMatteo recalls, DJ caught whiff of a partially buried sample and waited, expectantly, for the humans to figure it out. “It’s like, ‘We’re trying! We only have eyes,’” she says, laughing.
DJ’s invested in getting the team on the same page—unless they pick up the poop, he doesn’t get his pay. “DJ doesn’t really seem to know what a puma is,” DeMatteo admits. Instead, it’s the household tennis ball—green, fuzzy, fun—that motivates him to clock in for six-hour hikes, on four days and off just one, for five weeks at a time. For each successful detection, DJ gets up to 15 minutes of play. And sometimes, when hands are plentiful, belly rubs.
DJ can be trained to locate many things a conservationist might want, not just puma poop. He knows by heart the scents of 10 different mammals’ scat plus gopher frogs, and he can pinpoint an out-of-bloom orchid by the smell of its underground roots. His calendar is packed from May to September, with conservation organizations booking him flights: Nebraska, Argentina, perhaps Bhutan this year.
DeMatteo met DJ in 2021. He had just started training to become a narcotics-sniffing police officer. At a friend’s farm, the pair did trials for various scents. Under controlled conditions, even a house pet can do scent work. “Those dogs are perfectly high energy—but, for 30 minutes,” DeMatteo says. “Will the dog push through brush? Will the dog cross water?” These questions can only be answered in the field. DJ came out ahead of the dogs DeMatteo was trialing—conservation work just wasn’t interesting for the others, she says.
When the work’s a match for the dog, “they wake up and their tail is thumping,” DeMatteo says. Once she puts her backpack on, DJ knows. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, we’re going!’” For the right dog, it’s not work at all. “For them, it’s just play.”
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Pay: about 10 minutes’ play per poop found. Requires a willingness to travel, being a team player with good communication skills, and serious stamina. Not compatible with a high prey drive.
