Published: March 22, 2007 11:59 am      

Sniff, Wag, Find

Handlers put their four-legged partners through the paces

ROCKY GAP - Onyx, Sarge, Bear, Bali, Liberty and Patriot are spending the week at Rocky Gap State Park, sniffing, running and alerting in preparation for the serious work of helping wildlife enforcement officers in Maryland and Pennsylvania solve crimes and find missing people.

The dogs, all Labrador retrievers, brought their handlers with them; conservation officers of the Pennsylvania Game Commission and natural resource police officers of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

Although the dogs have been trained in various places and respond to different commands, their purpose is singular. They are used to find evidence such as spent rifle shell casings, to track hunters who may be trespassing, to find discarded objects such as a firearm or, in more tragic circumstances, to locate bodies.

Every dog handler has his or her stories. The dogs just wag their tails.

"We got a tip that a farmer had killed deer illegally," said Darin Clark, a conservation officer from Erie County, Pa. "I took Sarge and he went in to a very large barn and worked the ground floor without success."

Clark said Sarge, all 65 pounds of him, was lifted into a hayloft and within seconds had alerted.

"Our dogs are trained to alert by sitting," Clark said. "There was Sarge sitting on a pile of hay and underneath the hay is the buck's head with antlers attached."

Pennsylvania's dogs might sit when they find that which they seek, but Maryland's dogs either scratch or come running back to get their handler.

The labs are handled by NRP Officers Curt Dieterle in Allegany County and April Sharpeta in Harford and Baltimore counties. Blu and Bear scratch when they find the turkey feather or the deer hair or the shell casing.

But when NRP Officer Lisa Nyland is called out from her Eastern Shore location she brings Liberty and Patriot who are so excited that they have found the object of their desire that they come running back and jump on Nyland and take her to the spot.

Sharpeta said Bear's first find was a person.

"There was a car stolen near Havre de Grace and the driver had an accident and was ejected. Bear found him lying unconscious in a cornfield some distance away," Sharpeta said.

While at Rocky Gap, the officers work their dogs, training them further to find items and track people in various terrain. Training inside structures also takes place. Work is actually play to the dogs, the handlers agree, their delight evidenced by continually wagging tails.

Blu, based in Allegany County, will alert to the smell of deer, turkey and black bear. Bear, the Central Maryland Labrador retriever, sniffs deer and turkey too, but is also trained to alert to ducks and geese.

Linda Swank, a Pennsylvania conservation officer in Lancaster County, responded with her dog, Onyx, to a call that a woman had been shot by hunters.

"What had happened was that a pheasant was shot at and the pellets rained down on the woman. She wasn't injured," Swank said. "We checked it out and Onyx found the empty shells and we could actually see where the pellets had gone through the trees. We had GPS readings taken and were able to determine precisely where the shot came from and that it was taken illegally from inside a safety zone."

Not only did Onyx find the casings, but also the dead pheasant and the wad that came out of the shotgun shell, according to Swank.

Nyland's dogs, as well as Bali, the lab handled by NRP reserve officer Alan McLoughlin of Cecil County, are cadaver dogs used to find bodies. Nyland, in fact, was called to the Pentagon following the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, though it was with a former dog, Jesse, now deceased.

"The dogs need worked as often as possible," said Dieterle. "We learn something from each other every time we get together," he said of the meeting with fellow handlers.

Officers and dogs from Delaware were invited to the weeklong session, but were unable to attend.

Michael A. Sawyers can be reached at msawyers@times-news.com.