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- A shelluva hunting day Knoxville News3 spaniels sniff out and retrieve box turtles for population studyOAK RIDGE - It took Sparky five minutes to find the first box turtle. No sooner had the 7-year-old bird dog delivered the reptile to John Rucker's hand than Buster came trotting through the woods, proudly carrying another turtle.
By MORGAN SIMMONS, simmonsm@knews.com
July 9, 2006
"We got ourselves a double," Rucker said.
Rucker owns Sparky, Buster and Jake - three Boykin spaniels trained to sniff out and retrieve box turtles. During the fall and winter, Rucker and his dogs hunt pheasant in Montana. When summer rolls around, they look for Eastern box turtles, a well-known species that may be in trouble.
Last week Rucker and his dogs hunted turtles at the University of Tennessee Arboretum, a 250-acre research facility in Oak Ridge.
The Clinch River Environmental Studies Organization - a joint project between the Department of Energy and Anderson County and Oak Ridge schools that trains high school students in biological fieldwork - invited them down to look for box turtles in a 25-acre tract of woods scheduled to be logged this fall. In the years to come, Rucker and his dogs will return to the area to re-assess the turtle population in light of the logging operation.
The turtle hunt started at 9 a.m. while the woods were still shady and cool.
Sparky, Buster and Jake were out front, with Rucker following close behind. At the end of the procession were six CRESO students. Every time a dog found a box turtle, the students marked the location with a flag and rushed the turtle back to a study station. After recording such data as the turtle's size, sex and age, the students gave each specimen a number and released it at the capture site.
Of the three Boykin spaniels, Sparky and Buster had the most experience and found the most box turtles. They quartered in front of Rucker with their tails wagging and their noses pressed to the ground.
"These are heavy-duty field-trial dogs that have been hunted on pheasants," Rucker said. "Basically, they're transferring that same intensity to this game."
Rucker didn't set out to turn his Boykin spaniels into turtle dogs. One day, when he and Buster were out in the field, they came across a box turtle feeding on a mushroom. Buster just sniffed that first turtle, but a little while later, he located two more box turtles and delivered them both to Rucker's hand.
With a little praise from Rucker, Buster turned into a top-notch turtle dog. Before long, Sparky learned, too.
"The physics of what they do with their noses is still a mystery to me," Rucker said.
A retired high school English teacher, Rucker spent nine years commercial fishing in Alaska. He now lives in upper East Tennessee near the Holston River. Box turtles, along with fishing and pheasant hunting, are his passion.
On a typical day, Rucker's dogs might find 40 box turtles. By contrast, students with the CRESO project do well to locate 20 box turtles all summer.
Rucker and his dogs have hunted box turtles extensively in Virginia and North Carolina, and the results have been troubling. Not only is he finding fewer box turtles in these states, he also is finding fewer juvenile turtles that would indicate a healthy population.
Rucker said that from what he has observed, East Tennessee's box turtle population is in better shape than North Carolina's or Virginia's.
"My contention is that this region is the last stronghold for the Eastern box turtle in the Southeast," he said.
Tennessee law makes it illegal to import, possess or sell any turtle, tortoise or terrapin species as a pet. This level of protection is higher than most states and stems in part from research conducted by the Tennessee Aquarium and the Knoxville Zoo.
The dogs located most of the box turtles in moist, low-lying areas with thick vegetation. Once, while working the ridgeline, Buster winded a box turtle on an updraft coming from a ravine. Like a heat-guided missile, the 8-year-old spaniel vectored in on the scent, which belonged to an adult male wandering beside a maple tree.
Being well-trained retrievers, the Boykin spaniels delivered the turtles to Rucker unharmed. Except for a coating of drool, there was no way to tell that turtles had been in their mouths.
The bulk of a box turtles' diet consists of slugs, snails and earthworms. Rucker believes that loss of habitat, along with climate change, is reducing their numbers at an alarming rate.
"The Southeast is losing its moisture," he said. "The box turtle is probably the most loved reptile in America, and it may be on the verge of extinction."
By the end of the first hour, the dogs had found 12 box turtles. The good news was that four of the turtles were juveniles. They were the size of hockey pucks and maybe 10 years old, judging from the growth rings on their shells. The spaniels fanned out along the steep mountainsides. Experience had taught them to sniff around fallen trees, where box turtles tend to congregate. The dogs were reading the habitat, and Rucker was reading the dogs.
"I can recognize their body posture in a heartbeat," Rucker said. "I'm amazed every day I'm with them in the field." Dogs Specialize in Sniffing Out Turtles
Follow this link to read the May 20th 2011 article in the Transylvania Times.
"May, 2005
I have hunted for many years with a game bird biologist from Washington state. He has raised mountain lion hounds for decades and has shipped dogs from Alberta to Arizona. This consummate houndsman gave me a broader view of working dogs than I would otherwise possess. One of his primary tenets is that a dog needs to weigh about 45 pounds to be able to effectively break through heavy woody cover and brush. If a dog is much over 50 pounds, he may tend to overheat in hot weather early in the season and break down in the hips after the age of nine years. If the dog is going to "run big" for a living, he needs to have approximately the proportion of leg and torso that the proven breeds, such as the German Shorthair, English Pointer, English Setter and the various treeing hounds all possess. My Montana Boykins fit neatly into this category. The two Boykins I am now blessed to call my own have what I consider to be the ideal combination of personality and conformation. Each weighs between 45 and 50 pounds and has the leg to ramble the CRP (Conservation Resource Pool) grasslands, as well as the more thinly grassed native short-grass prairie. My Montana Boykins cover the square miles of bird habitat with an easy lope.
I have often watched my long-legged Boykin, Sparky (my thicket specialist), as he negotiates his way through the heavy, woody cover in a Montana coulee. If he thinks he smells birds lounging in the shade of chokecherry bushes during the heat of the day, he uses a form of locomotion which would be quite impossible for s short-legged dog. Since he knows he cannot overpower the thorn, he brings into play a curious, stiff-legged rocking horse motion, hardly flexing his legs at all, keeping his underbelly above the wild rose bushes as much as possible. He rises high on his hind legs, pausing to test the delicate air currents which wash the coulee, then leaps forward, onto utterly stiff front legs, landing nearly up to his face in thorns. He then slowly brings his equally stiff hind legs forward in a great, slow-motion rabbit hop. He repeats this plunging maneuver several times, and then pauses to test the air. If the scent proves to be just a tease, he reverses directions, and slowly plunges his way back out of the wild rose thorns. However, if he persists, with his gargantuan rabbit hops, to more deeper and deeper into the hears of the woody cover of the coulee, then you can bet that he's locked onto a breeze which has betrayed a covey of Hungarian Partridge.
The Boykin Spaniel is wonderfully easy to train. At about six weeks of age, I begin to teach my puppies their first commands of "sit", "heel", "go around", and "back". As soon as the dog has the maturity to comprehend what I'm asking, I work it on blind retrieves, sending them off with the command of "back". Later on, I train the dog to sit, even if they're a hundred yards away, with a long whistle blast. Next I work the dog to the left of the right with hand signals. This training will come in handy once you get in the field. If I see a bird fly into a piece of cover, or if I hear a rooster pheasant crow at the head of a coulee, I often heel the dog at my side until I'm in position. I then release the dog into the wind, and wait with a pounding heart, to see what will happen. When working heavy, woody cover, where a pointing dog will have a hard time getting a rooster to stop running, a flushing dog will often put up a bird on the other side of the thicket from the gun. The dog will hear the explosion of wings, and the pop of the gun, yet he will have no idea where the bird has fallen. This is when the blind retrieve is used. The dog is summoned with a short whistle tap, then given a line and sent off with "back". A big part of the pleasure of hunting a dog you have trained yourself is putting the commands to use, and seeing them work perfectly, and then giving the dog so much praise that he becomes embarrassed.
My Montana Boykins handle the open prairie grasslands and the miles of wheat stubble with a relaxed, rambling gait. With Sparky, the taller dog, his relaxed canter re-tells the story of the ugly duckling, grown finally into the beautiful, long-necked swan. I can still remember him as a half-grown pup with legs lo long he reminded me of a colt. I'm always bringing on a new puppy, so it will imprint on my finished dogs and be much like them.
I believe the South Carolina Boykin breeders developed a remarkable dog, which was perfect for turkeys and ducks in the low country, a place I dearly love myself. This smallish dog, so wanting to do your bidding, was perfect for lowering over the side of a narrow, tippy boat with one hand. Now Boykins with larger torsos and longer legs are winning the hearts of wing-shooters across the northern plains and are winning the trophies at the biggest and richest tournament hunts in Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. Yet the spirit of the Boykin is the same, for that could not be improved upon.
© John Rucker, hunting partner of Buster, Sparky and Jake"
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