Honey is a 3-year-old German shepherd sired by a champion protection canine and an award-winning American Kennel Club show dog.
But Honey is taking a different path in life: She’s destined to be a conservation dog.
First Wind, which operates the new 30-megawatt wind farm in Kahuku, has enlisted her to find endangered species that have fallen below its 12 turbines.
Her training will continue despite a fire that destroyed the wind farm’s battery energy storage building earlier this month. First Wind aims to have Honey sniff out seven endangered birds — the Hawaiian petrel, Newell’s shearwater, Hawaiian koloa, stilt, coot, short-eared owl and moorhen — and one mammal, the Hawaiian hoary bat.
All have been identified as species potentially affected by the towering wind turbines.
Her task will be what First Wind calls "fatality monitoring," basically the regular count of the birds or bats killed in collisions with the turbines. The measure is required as a condition of the company’s state and federal permits.
"I picked her because of her natural ability," said Matthew Wickey, First Wind’s senior wildlife technician and canine handler. "You have to have a high drive for food or toys, and she has both."
First Wind staff currently monitor endangered species fatalities by walking along transects — defined pathways for conducting the counts — within a 64-meter radius of the farm. They walk or ride an all-terrain vehicle along the transects two to three times a week, looking 10 feet to the right and left and in gulches for any fallen endangered species.
With its brown or gray fur, the hoary bat, or opeapea, is difficult to spot on the ground. With their superior sense of smell, dogs can detect the dead animals much more efficiently than the human eye, according to Wickey. First Wind expects the use of conservation dogs to reduce costs and improve the accuracy of its monitoring data.
In the field, Honey will be trained to lower her nose when she picks up the scents of birds or bats and will immediately be rewarded with either a treat or a tennis ball.
Eventually, Wickey said, she will be trained to sit to signal one of the scents.
Although Honey is not on the First Wind payroll, the dog lives with Wickey and is rewarded with trips to the beach.
"She’s like family," he said.
First Wind first used dogs to detect endangered seabirds in the summer of 2010 on Maui, where it operates Kaheawa Wind Farm above Maalaea.
The company hired dog detection teams from New Zealand to search through dense ground cover for breeding petrels and shearwaters. First Wind plans to protect the breeding habitat with a predator-proof fence.
CONSERVATION dogs — or wildlife detection dogs — are not an entirely new concept, though they are not used extensively in Hawaii.
New Zealand has been using conservation dogs since the 1890s and has a certification program for canines used for that purpose.
At the University of Washington, a Conservation Canines program trains dogs to help scientists locate scat (animal excrement) as a more cost-effective alternative to using remote cameras, radio-collaring and trapping.
In Montana four wildlife biologists launched a nonprofit called Working Dogs for Conservation in 2000, focusing on dogs’ ability to smell out endangered species or invasive weeds.
The group’s detection dogs have gone into the jungles of Cameroon in Africa to find dung samples of the endangered Cross River gorilla and combed the forests of southern China in search of moon bear scat.
A few years ago, Working Dogs brought Tia, a German shepherd, and Wicket, a black Labrador-retriever mix, to Hawaii to help the Oahu Army Natural Resources Program find and manage the rosy wolf snail, or Euglandina rosea, a predatory snail decimating the endangered Kahuli tree snail in the Waianae Mountains.
Working dog breeds — typically shepherds, retrievers and collies — are good potential trainees for conservation work.
"We look for dogs with a lot of focus and drive," said Working Dogs co-founder Alice Whitelaw.
Some are recruited from shelters or trained as puppies, while others are "career change" dogs previously involved in other canine work or competitive pursuits.
A conservation dog typically needs anywhere from three to four months of training before it is ready to work in the field, she said.
There are no formal conservation dog training programs in Hawaii, although dogs here have been trained to detect everything from human remains to narcotics and bedbugs.
If Honey learns to detect the odor of the Hawaiian hoary bat, she would be the first dog in the state with that ability, according to Wickey.
Honey will be joined by at least three more dogs that will help monitor the endangered species at Kawailoa, a 69-megawatt wind farm under construction northeast of Haleiwa.
First Wind expects to erect 30 wind turbines there, so there will be an even larger area to monitor.
