At Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary on Queensland's Gold Coast, one of the most valuable members of the conservation team has four legs and a squeaky-ball habit. Moose, a cocker spaniel trained as a conservation detection dog, spends his days helping researchers find species that humans struggle to locate even after decades of searching.
His handler, Michael Vella, has worked in wildlife conservation for more than 25 years, and his mornings with Moose are spent alongside the sanctuary's koala team. On a recent spring day, the dog helped track down two wild koalas, including one due for a chlamydia vaccination. It's a skill Moose proved early on: after learning to find fresh koala scat in controlled conditions, he picked up the scent of scat no one had planted in open bushland — with a koala sitting in the tree above it.
The bigger prize, though, is frogs. The Kroombit tinker frog, a critically endangered species that had dwindled to roughly 150 individuals, is central to the sanctuary's breed-for-release program, run from a Frog Lab kept at a chilly 12°C. Males can be found by triangulating their distinctive call, but females are silent, and the species' eggs and tadpoles have never been found in the wild despite decades of research. A dog that can smell what eyes can't see could change that equation entirely.
Moose is now also being trained on the endangered eastern bristlebird, whose dome-shaped nests hide in dense grass tussocks and are nearly invisible to people. Trials with deliberately placed nests have gone well, and his next challenge is finding active wild nests — with the crucial twist that he's taught to stop short, stand straight and stare at the location rather than disturb it. Eggs or chicks from those nests could eventually join a breeding program to boost the species' genetic diversity.
The sanctuary hopes to grow the trial into a full program with three dogs, dedicated staff and its own facility, supporting work on koalas, bristlebirds and tinker frogs as well as collaborations with other conservation projects. Detection dogs cover far more ground than human searchers and do it with minimal intrusion — a combination that's hard to beat when your study subject is a thumb-sized frog under a rock.
For travellers, this is a nice reminder that a Gold Coast holiday can include more than beaches and theme parks. Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary is a working conservation hub as well as a visitor attraction, and programs like this one rely on public fundraising and support. Even if you don't spot Moose on the job, a visit connects your trip to real research on some of Australia's most endangered animals — and if you follow the sanctuary's work, you'll get to watch a very good dog become an ambassador for species that badly need the attention.
Story first reported by Australian Geographic.
