Sunday 9 April 2017

Dogs for wildlife conservation - CK9

Meet with the CK9 dogs

We, I and Adarsh dai, had a chance to shortly meet Jennifer Hartman and Suzie Marlow from CK9 group, while they were on their way to airport travelling to their next work site after 2 months of work in Nepal’s challenging terrains. A short intro about this group, Conservation Canines (CK9) is a part of Center for Conservation Biology, University of Washington. And they deal with scat detection dogs or sniffer dogs trained to find scats of wild animals in the wild. After finding scats of wild animals, biologist/ecologist/geneticist can study more in detail about the species through DNA extracted off these scats. These dogs are highly trained for the work that they do, such as going out in the wild in completely new and challenging terrains of every sorts all over the world whenever an elusive species need to be studied. And what’s more interesting about them is that these dogs are not any specific pedigree breed dogs, they are all mixed or abandoned strays picked up from shelters in US.

Having been following their facebook page (link) for nearly 4-5 years now when I was studying in Finland, I really liked the kind of work they have been doing for over the past 10 years in the field of wildlife conservation as well as animal welfare. It struck me immediately when I saw their facebook post (about 2 months back in Feb) that two of their team dog members, CK9 Athena and CK9 Skye, are in Nepal for pangolin work. But never had I imagined that I would get to meet them in person on the last day last moment of their work in Nepal, while they were leaving for their flight. Thanks to these wonderful and dedicated people from the Conservation Canines, who are also the dog handlers of these two sniffer dogs. Pangolins are one of the world’s most trafficked wildlife and are in the verge of extinction. And scientists from UW are going to try tracking illegal trade of pangolins by use of molecular genetics tools. They have pioneered similar work in tracking the origin of illegally traded ivory through use of genetics and helped identify two main elephant poaching hotspots (more info). Definitely this is not our last meet, we will meet in the coming days for more works on pangolins. And I am equally excited about their passion of training local dogs in Nepal for similar works in the future. Putting the nose of dogs for such work will not only aid wildlife conservation, but also helps provide a stray or abandoned yet equally capable dog a very healthy, exciting and meaningful life. And no any wildlife or dogs are hurt during the work, which makes this whole process a noninvasive.

PHOTOS:

CK9 Athena and Skye, with their handlers Jennifer and Suzie.















The CK9 team with Adarsh dai.





















Photo sources: Adarsh Man Sherchan.

More links about CK9 and their work:

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Saturday 8 April 2017

Leopards in Chandragiri landscape

Phantom of Kathmandu

Chandragiri landscape is a hilly range covering most of south-western ridge of Kathmandu valley. The hills are preserved by community forestry management, and are full of dense lush green hill forests. This landscape elevates from around 1500m asl to above 2500m asl with varying degree of vegetation types along the altitudinal gradients. It is an important biodiversity area, but not much of it has been studied in detail.

Leopards are largest wild carnivore and on top of the food chain in this landscape. They share their habitat throughout the landscape with humans along villages mostly in fringes and base of the hill range. Barking deer, wild boar, rhesus and assamese macaques could form the main prey base for leopards in this landscape. Stray or feral dogs roaming freely along the human settlements could also form one of the main urban prey options for leopards. Other sympatric carnivores include leopard cat, jungle cat, large indian civet, masked palm civet and golden jackal.

The indirect signs like scats, pugmarks and scratch marks of leopards are observed very often in the jungles of this landscape.  One day it so happened that I even felt a very fresh yet pungent smell of a spray or urine mark of leopard while walking a trail under canopy of the jungle. I felt the leopard could have been very near but never did I see it then. There are cases of leopards in conflict with people in and around the human settlements in the landscape. Settlement areas like Kirtipur, Matatirtha, Pharping, Chalnakhel are some of the regions around this landscape where leopards sneak into, mainly in search of domestic prey such as goats, stray cattle, pet animals and stray dogs.  Since Jan 2016 to Feb 2017, two leopards have been caught at two different occasions from local houses in Kirtipur and were released elsewhere in natural habitat; one leopard got killed in a man leopard conflict in Matatirtha; while another leopard died of an unidentified cause in Chalnakhel. This makes at least four leopards to have been removed from the area in just about one year time. We don’t know how many leopards still prowl this landscape, but it may not be long that they get to survive many generations to come.

PHOTOS:





















FILE PHOTOS:

leopard captured after tranquilized in Kirtipur (Jan 2016).
Photo source: himalayan times















leopard rescued after tranquilized by Radha K Gharti, senior 
vet of zoo and kathmandu's professional leopard catcher
(Feb 2017).  Photo source: nepalireporter.com
















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