Maremmas Guarding Penguins

The end was in sight for the Middle Island colony of little penguins (Eudyptula minor).

“Massacred,” read the banner headline in the local newspaper — just the single word, as if describing an act of war. Below it was a photo of dead penguins and other birds, the latest casualties in Australia’s long history of imported species’ decimating native wildlife.

Foxes killed 180 penguins in that particular episode, in October 2004. But the toll on Middle Island, off Victoria State in southern Australia, kept rising. By 2005, the small island’s penguin population, which had once numbered 800, was below 10.

Salvation for the little penguins came in the form of a Maremma sheepdog.  The Maremma is an Italian guardian dog bred to live among the sheep it guards.  At the same time the Middle Island little penguins were hanging on by a thread, a local free range chicken farmer, Allan “Swampy” Marsh, had begun to use Maremmas to protect his wandering chickens from foxes, the same predators decimating the penguin colony.  When Swampy heard of the penguins’ plight, the solution was obvious to him.  Train Maremmas to act as penguin guardians on Middle Island.

For a class assignment, David Williams, a university student who worked on Mr. Marsh’s farm, wrote up a proposal for deploying the dogs on the island, and later submitted a more formal version to the state environmental agency. But even as the penguin population kept dwindling, the approval process dragged on as the plan was vetted by overlapping government entities. “There was a lot of talking,” Mr. Williams said.

It took until 2006 to convince local authorities, raise funds and demonstrate the concept.  But, it didn’t take long for the first two Maremmas – Ben and later Oddball – to prove that to a Maremma guarding was a species blind task.  Sheep, chickens, penguins are apparently all the same to a properly trained Maremma.

Since then, Middle Island’s penguin population has rebounded to 150, and not one has been lost to a fox, said Mr. Williams, who now works for Zoos Victoria, the operator of three zoos in the state.

The local community took the Maremmas to heart and when the first generation of penguin guardians retired successors were ready to go.  Now, as the second generator nears retirement the community has raised funds to bring on another generation.

On Middle Island, Oddball’s successors, Eudy and Tula (their names come from the word Eudyptula, the little penguin’s genus), are still keeping foxes away but, at 8 years old, are nearing retirement. Local groups managing the project recently raised more than $18,000 online to buy and train two new Maremma pups.

The first new pup is in training.

The project's coordinator, Peter Abbott, said its new arrival — a nine-week-old Maremma puppy — had proven to be "a bit of a handful".

"We picked him up about a week ago, so he's growing at about a kilo a week and he's just a bundle of joy," he said.

"Over a bit of time we've learned we need to get the dogs on the island as young as possible, and getting them to see and smell the penguins as soon as possible."

The new puppy will be joined by a female companion in the latter half of the year — the first time a dog has been placed on the island by itself since the program's inception.

There are three take aways from this story. 

First, without dogs humans would still be hunter gatherers.  (Just an opinion.)

Second, disturbing the predator/prey equation has damaging consequence.  Foxes were imported to Australia (for sport hunting) and, without any natural predators, bred like crazy and decimated unprotected native populations, little penguins being only one example. 

And, third, as in many cases where dogs have been brought in to assist humans, they have done the job and demonstrated that there are other similar opportunities for this human/canine partnership to achieve conservation goals.

Zoos Victoria is now trying to use Maremma dogs to reintroduce to the wild the eastern barred bandicoot, a small marsupial not seen outside captivity since 2002. Several previous attempts have failed, but Zoos Victoria, which has pledged to prevent the extinction of any terrestrial vertebrate in Victoria, hopes the dogs will make a difference.

A five-year trial is underway... The puppies will learn to bond with sheep, which will also be present at the three trial sites, and with bandicoots, which are shy, nocturnal creatures, said Kimberley Polkinghorne, communications manager for the Werribee zoo.

“This trial draws on the success of the Middle Island project,” Ms. Polkinghorne said. “We are very excited about its potential to not just help bandicoots but other threatened species as well.”