A bug hunting dog

(Click the Play arrow to listen to this column.)

One recent morning as we headed out on our morning mission in the Couple Acre Wood, my young dog-buddy became captured by a decomposing hickory log. We had passed it numerous times, but this time it grabbed him by the nose and wouldn’t let go.

He began disassembling the 10-inch diameter log with jaws that would make a backhoe operator jealous. After a few minutes effort, he exposed his prey, an adult Horned passalus beetle, in a channel it had carved through the interior of the log. (By such efforts, beetles and their larvae, and others of the insect clan, help compost dead trees into food for future live trees.)

Several times, he pawed at it, sniffed it, picked it up and dropped it. I wondered what it felt like to have a quarter-inch wide, nearly inch and-a-half long bug crawling around on his tongue, trying to find a way out.

Bowie made it clear in the early days after he joined our family that he was a hunter. I’m regularly amazed at the way he can find critters hiding in places I don’t even notice — and I have learned to be a pretty good noticer, for a human.

One day, after he’d been rooting around in some forest duff, an opossum snuck out, crossed the path on which I stood waiting for the dog, and wove its way randomly among the saplings into another part of the woods. Within a few seconds, Bowie quit his snuffling and exited the bed of leaves he’d been searching, crossed the path on which I still stood, and followed, exactly, among the trees and bushes, the path the opossum had woven.

On the morning of this tale, when he dropped the beetle and I pulled him up before he could grab it again and led him away to complete our morning mission. Reluctantly, he turned his head for a last look back over his shoulder at his treasure. I followed as he weaved the leash through a Burning Bush thicket. I’d take the leash off but he’s still young and easily distracted. He has a few favorite places to go but he also is eagerly open to new discoveries.

On the lead, even the 100-footer I sometimes use for training in bigger fields, he will instantly come when I summon him. But I know from experience that if I take the leash off he will suddenly develop a deafness coincidentally tuned specifically to my voice.

His morning mission accomplished, and other areas of the Couple Acre Wood sufficiently inventoried, he led me back to where he had dropped the beetle.

The pup’s talents are a mixture of aural, olfactory and just plain memory. Unfortunately, though he clearly understands my language, he cannot speak it to tell me specifically how, seemingly magically, he locates some of his targets.

I know ants and other insects (and most other creatures, including humans), leave a pheromone trail by which others of their ilk can follow them. I’ve also read that the passalus beetles “sing” by rubbing their wings on their abdomen while they work and feed their larvae.

Apparently, the little critters leave a trail also detectable by dog. He poked around the spot where he had last set it down, then, following a path only he could “see” through the carpet of last year’s hickory leaves, he located his prey about two feet away.

I know it was the same one because when he’d first peeled that old log to expose the bug, I had noticed where he had scratched an identifying notch in the insect’s patent leather wing cover. (It’s also called a Patent Leather beetle because of the shiny black molded design of the covering.)

He did not eat the beetle, so I am not certain what he would do were he allowed to chase and catch some of the other critters he has scared up. Among the residents of the Couple Acre Wood are a family of three young bunnies, an undiscovered opossum litter, unknown populations of wood mice and ground hogs and, on a recent afternoon, a rudely awakened fox — all critters which have experienced a certain snuffling as Bowie follows his nose and leads me through the cacophony of sounds and smells that is our backyard.

Text & images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist, and lives in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com