‘Detective dogs’ sniff out rare species of dragon in Victoria

Daisy, Sugar,  and Kip are offering the last hope to saving a "dragon" thought to have been extinct. Video via AAP.

Transcript

00:00So since the grassland eilis dragon was discovered at the start of 2023,

00:04the wildlife detection dog team have been involved in training two dogs initially to see if we can

00:11teach them to identify the smell of a Victorian grassland eilis dragon and see if we can help

00:16survey for this species in the wild. We've had at least 10 wild dragons that were unknown that

00:24the dogs have found during surveys with their handlers and that's super exciting because it

00:27shows that the training and the hard work and the long months of being out here and all kinds of

00:32weather have paid off and we're starting to see two of the dogs now are able to continue on and

00:38do surveys in unknown or uncharted landscapes I suppose. We've incorporated training another two

00:45dogs so Finn and Sugar into our team and we're going to continue to survey for the Victorian

00:51grassland eilis dragons beyond the rediscovery property into areas where they might be persisting

00:56in this broader area. The second part which we're also really excited about is working on some other

01:02grassland eilis dragon species those that exist in Canberra, Monaro and potentially in Bathurst they

01:09haven't been seen for quite a long time as well. We're going to hopefully see if our dogs can generalize

01:14their learning from the Victorian species to those other species without any training at all.