Anna Weesies points at a tangle of zigzagging lines on a satellite map. It’s all of moose cow #214’s movements over the last couple weeks, tracked with a GPS collar.

A thin line shows the moose darted away from the wetland where she gave birth to a calf, then came back a few days later — a potential sign of distress.

“It's almost like she's confused, like this calf isn't following her,” said Weesies.

Like this calf could have been killed — maybe by a bear or a wolf.

Is that what happened here? Did 214 run away, scared by a predator, then come back to check whether her baby was still alive? The GPS lines can’t answer all that.

“So we're just gonna go look and see if we can find evidence of a calf, and then see if, you know, there's any, you know, moose parts,” Weesies said.

But to find any of that, Anna Weesies needs some help. A detection dog is going to figure out if this calf is dead or alive and show us a world we can’t access, using his nose.

Credits:
Producer: Ellie Katz
Host: Dan Wanschura
Editing: Morgan Springer, Dan Wanschura
Music: Blue Dot Sessions

Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: Something seems wrong with moose cow #214.

ANNA WEESIES:  So she's just kinda hanging out, and then all of a sudden she starts making– You see how crazy she went there? Like just jumping all over the place.

WANSCHURA: Anna Weesies points at a tangle of zigzagging lines on a satellite map. It’s all of moose cow 214’s movements over the last couple weeks, tracked with a GPS collar.

WEESIES: And then you've got this out and back just like that. 

WANSCHURA: Anna can tell a lot by these lines. She tracks almost 50 moose like this in Minnesota’s dense Northwoods. Two weeks ago, 214’s line didn’t move much. She found a spot near a wetland and gave birth to a calf there. And then, not long after, 214 ran away before doubling back — a typical sign of distress.

WEESIES: It's almost like she's confused, like this calf isn't following her. 

WANSCHURA: Like this calf could have been killed. In some years, around 80 percent of moose calves born here don’t survive. Most are eaten by bears or wolves. Is that what happened here? Did 214 run away, scared by a predator, then come back to check whether her baby was still alive? The GPS lines can’t answer all that.

WEESIES:  So we're just gonna go look and see if we can find evidence of a calf, and then see if, you know, there's any, you know, moose parts.

WANSCHURA: Moose parts: flecks of blood, bits of flesh, bone splinters.

But to find any of that, Anna needs some help.

WEESIES: Hi, buddy. Hello. 

ELLIE KATZ: So this is Wheeler? 

STU HOEGH: This is Wheeler. 

[dog barking]

WANSCHURA: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.

[dog sniffing]

WANSCHURA: Today, a detection dog is going to figure out if this calf is dead or alive and show us a world we can’t access, using his nose. Producer Ellie Katz takes it from here.

ELLIE KATZ, BYLINE: Wheeler is a mutt with a lot of chocolate lab in him. He arrives on scene with his usual tools: his harness and his handler, whose name is Stu Hoegh.

STU HOEGH:  And then he wears a bell. Um, that's what you'll hear it dinging. But, uh, it tells- It... So I know where he's at, it helps. And then when he s- So when he indicates, he stops moving.

KATZ: So when the bell stops, it means Wheeler’s found something.

HOEGH:  All right, buddy. You ready to work? All right, let's go find it. Let's go find it.  

[bell ringing, forest sounds, hiking sounds]

KATZ: It’s 5:30am. A cool, humid morning like this is good for holding smells on the landscape. Mosquitoes hover in small clouds. We bushwack back to the swampy, muggy wetland where moose cow 214 made her weird movement. We go under branches and over wet, rotten logs.

KATZ:  Whoa, that was a big hole. 

KATZ: My leg falls knee-deep into a big, mossy hole.

KATZ: That's crazy. This is a thick thicket.

[hiking sounds, twigs snapping]

KATZ: Wheeler is a young dog, and he’s a little over-excited this morning. He’s wiggly and keeps thinking my microphone is a big, furry ball.

KATZ: Don’t eat my microphone. 

WEESIES: Uh-uh! He caught sight of that and was like, “Oooh!”

KATZ: Wheeler is a detection dog: he’s trained to track specific smells. Today’s assignment is moose. Stu got Wheeler from a shelter out west. Like a lot of detection dogs, Wheeler would not have fit well with a family. He’s got a lot of energy; he’d be pretty rough around kids.

HOEGH: For this kind of thing it's great. It's great for him.

KATZ: Wheeler bounds ahead through little green clusters of bunchberry and thick patches of hazelnut.

KATZ:  I'm just pushing my body through branches. You can hear all the mic handling noise. Just so many snags.

HOEGH: Wheeler, this way! This way!

He is much better at this than we are.

WEESIES:  He just kind of moves through the woods really well. He’s just kind of gliding through and–

KATZ: Anna is a biologist for the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

WEESIES: When he catches a scent or an odor, his head kind of pops up a little bit. He gets a little bit perkier, like his tail is a little bit higher.

KATZ: The tribe has hired detection dogs to help them with their moose research for seven years now. That’s because a dog’s sense of smell is far more powerful than ours.

DR. CINDY OTTO:  Well, I like to think about dogs smelling in color. 

KATZ: Dr. Cindy Otto leads a center for working dogs at the University of Pennsylvania’s vet school.

OTTO: They see the world through the odor patterns much more than they see visually. And really what they're doing is painting a picture of smells, and the incredible thing about smells is unlike a visual, we see what's there. With a smell, they see what's been there. 

KATZ: In Wheeler’s nose, there’s a honeycomb-shaped tissue jam packed with scent receptors – a couple hundred million scent receptors. That's about 40 times as many as we have. Wheeler can tap into a whole cornucopia of smell that’s totally invisible to us.

OTTO:  Coca-Cola is a classic example. You smell something and you're like, "Ah, that's Coke." Whereas the dog is smelling the vanilla and the lemon and, you know, all of these other components that are in it. You know, if someone put a drop of something else in the Coke, we're not gonna smell it 'cause all we smell is Coke. But they would smell, you know, whatever it is that they were trained to smell even in that background.

KATZ: Dogs can tell two twins apart. They can smell cancer in blood samples. And they can distinguish a moose calf from an adult moose and how long ago it was around. Humans lost the ability to pick up on these subtle chemical clues during evolution. But many mammals – bears, wolves, moose – still rely primarily on smell to make sense of the world around them. And Wheeler is a window to that world.

WEESIES:  It's so hard to see just a tuft of fur or, you know, a piece of hide. It'd be next to impossible to find some of these calves.

KATZ: Wheeler’s nose can do it quickly. Not because he loves the smell of moose, but because he’s obsessed with his tennis ball. Stu, his trainer, relies on that obsession. He uses moose scat and hair and body parts to teach Wheeler what smells to find. And when Wheeler gets it right, he gets his reward: a few minutes of tug-of-war with the ball.

HOEGH: I want something, right? I wanna find evidence of the calf, and then he wants his tennis ball, and it's like I have the tennis ball. He knows how to find that evidence, and then we kind of work out a deal. 

WEESIES:  Yeah, we're using the dog to translate what's going on in the landscape.

[bell ringing, hiking sounds]

HOEGH:  This way, bud. This way. 

KATZ: Wheeler’s little bell slows down. He lowers his head to sniff something, snorting a little bit. Stu calls it “being in odor.”

HOEGH:  Just kind of like that intense sniffing. He's in odor. There's something there that is interesting.

[sniffing, snorting]

KATZ: But Wheeler doesn’t stop. He lifts his head and keeps moving. Whatever he smelled isn’t moose — he knows he won’t get his ball for it.

[sound of forest fades out]

KATZ: For Wheeler, finding remains of a dead calf is just a fun game. But for scientists, it’s one more piece in a big puzzle. There were once about 8,000 moose living in northern Minnesota. Then about 20 years ago, the moose population started to crash. And it was cut in half. It was almost unimaginable that these massive animals – these icons of the northwoods that bounded through snow and swam across lakes without issue – could just disappear. A parasitic brainworm was killing moose.

WEESIES:  The brain worm doesn't stop burrowing and ends up burrowing into the brain.

KATZ: Causing neurological issues and death. It was one big reason moose were being driven to the brink. So scientists in the Grand Portage Band started gathering as much data as they could about moose life cycles. And using dogs to do it more quickly than in the past.

WEESIES: Using the dogs like this and sending them into areas for confirmation of birth, confirmation that either the calf is alive or it, you know, it died. We get really good data, and we can save time.

[bell ringing]

KATZ: We finally reach the wetland — the specific coordinates where moose cow 214 made that sudden, erratic movement. The swamp is surrounded by cedar and aspen and willow.

HOEGH:  I bet there's something around here. That might be one.

KATZ: Wheeler starts to systematically scan the area for signs of a dead calf. He hits on something. Not tufts of hair, or bone splinters, or blood. But adult moose scat, oval shaped and brown, like mini footballs. The scat is a couple weeks old: there’s a crust on each pellet.

WEESIES: [inhalation] Like a, a faint cow smell.

KATZ: It’s solid evidence that a moose was here recently. Almost certainly cow 214. But what about 214’s baby? That’s after the break.

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KATZ: On this side of the wetland, there’s just scat and some trees gnawed by beavers. So we follow Wheeler around to the other side. As we move, there are more signs of adult moose.

WEESIES:  Oh, you can see that the moose broke off that, that sapling there.

KATZ: But still, no sign of a calf dead or alive. Wheeler keeps searching, trotting through the brush like a deer. His nose low to the ground. Here’s Dr. Otto again.

OTTO:  There's a game that people play that's called “Where's Waldo?” And you have to find the little guy with the glasses and the red-and-white-striped hat among all of these others. And as humans, we can do that. And I equate that to dogs finding their odor in a very, very complex background. 

KATZ: Wheeler is looking for his own little Waldo: some piece of moose calf hidden in all the brush.

[bell ringing, leaves rustling]

KATZ: Wheeler knows what to look for because he’s found it before. A few days ago, he and Stu checked on another site. They did the same thing we’re doing today: hiked to a spot where a different moose cow was making strange, erratic movements on the GPS.

HOEGH:  it was like this, a clear day, like 60s. And maybe three-quarters of a mile back in,  he cut away, straight away from me, and started hooking left. And he hits on something, and I come up and it's just the hoof of a calf. And that's a sign that it could be a wolf kill with—

KATZ: With just bits and pieces of the calf left behind. But then Wheeler found something even bigger a few feet away. An entire moose calf carcass or, really, the skin of a moose calf carcass.

HOEGH: The skull was out, the innards were out. No bones left in it except for those lower legs. 

KATZ: Stu realized this was a bear kill not a wolf kill.

HOEGH:  It was wild. 

WEESIES:  Bears will eat them in a very specific manner that, you know, they skin 'em and it's almost like a puppet, like a morbid puppet.

KATZ: This discovery is the whole reason they’re out here. Scientists can’t get rid of brainworm, but they can figure out which animals kill these calves. And they can use that to try and help more calves survive. Like, they’ve been setting up bear baiting stations: basically big tubs of bear trail mix to draw the predators away from moose calves in the spring. Something they’re testing right now.

KATZ: Anna sometimes names the moose she sees on her wildlife cameras or encounters during GPS collaring missions. One calf she called Jet, because of how he ran and jumped around his mom. Another moose was Puddles. But for both her and Stu, it’s not particularly emotional to find these kills. It’s just the cycle of an ecosystem.

HOEGH: you feel a bit of accomplishment and  proud of the dog, happy for the dog. Yeah, probably more than anything. 

[bell ringing]

KATZ: On today’s search at the wetland, we’ve found a couple signs of adult moose: scat, a broken sapling. But so far, nothing else. We’ve been at it, looking around this swamp, for almost an hour. Wheeler will need a rest soon. But before we head back, he leads us to the muddy edge of the wetland. And there, in the muck, are two pairs of moose tracks.

HOEGH:  If you can see that, these two are little, and then the big calf tracks here. 

WEESIES: Yeah, we got mom and calf tracks here in the mud. 

HOEGH:  It seems like maybe they were, you know, working in here and surely the calf was around somewhere.

WEESIES:  So it does tell me that she at least brought a calf here, and it doesn't necessarily tell me that, you know, it's still alive, although I kinda suspect just from our searches right now it probably is.  That’s a good boy. Good job, buddy.

KATZ: Wheeler gets to go play in the marshy water for a few minutes to cool off. The more we look around, the more convinced Anna is that this calf is still alive. And the erratic movement its mom made was just a natural movement to and from the wetland with her calf as it grew old enough to travel. This spring, things have actually gone better for moose. Thirty six moose cows gave birth and the team has only found seven dead calves. That’s a far cry from the 80 percent mortality in past years.

WEESIES:  Makes Stu's job a little bit more boring, but that's a good thing. 

KATZ: Maybe the bear baiting stations helped this spring. Or maybe wolf and bear populations are just down. But there is a consensus on one thing: Minnesota’s moose population, although half its original size, is stabilizing for now. Staying stable is not a given. So the work keeps going.

WEESIES:  It's kind of a puzzle. You know, we're doing this without getting eyes on the animals we’re collecting signs from the woods and from GPS movements. And then using a dog's nose to tell you what's going on in the woods… did you find what you expected to find? 

[twigs breaking, hiking]

KATZ: We hike back. Wheeler gets a drink of water and pants, his long tongue hanging out. Then he climbs into his kennel in the back of Stu’s truck. Two chocolate eyes stare out at us. Below them, a long, brown nose sticks out between the metal bars, still sniffing.