These pooches – which can identify poop deposited by such creatures as wolves, fishers and even whales – are moving from Seattle to the University of Washington’s 4,300-acre Pack Forest. The Douglas fir forest serves as a laboratory and conference center. It’s also a destination for hikers and horseback riders.

“It’s in an unbelievably gorgeous setting. It’s going to be incredible,” said biologist Sam Wasser, director of the UW’s Center for Conservation Biology in Seattle.

Five trainers will live in the Pack Forest compound and train many of the dogs there. “It’s a complex ecosystem that allows us to simulate many of the situations they’re going to deal with in the real world,” Wasser said.

Researchers collect the poop and test it for hormones, contaminants and genetic identifiers, markers otherwise available through invasive methods, such as blood draws or tissue samples.

His dogs’ talent for hunting the scat of otherwise elusive creatures has been featured in National Geographic, among other publications.

Donations make it possible to erect a $500,000, state-of-the-art kennel near the forest’s headquarters. The prefabricated building will probably go up in September, Wasser said.

The dogs now live in donated digs in Seattle.

In 1997, Wasser pioneered scat-tracking techniques using dogs to collect excrement left behind by grizzly and black bears in and around Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. What Wasser found in the poop allowed scientists to assess bear population health in that region.

Since then, Wasser said he and others have trained similar dogs to find the poop of right whales in the Bay of Fundy; caribou, moose and wolves in areas of Alberta targeted for oil-sands exploration; and mink-like fishers in Northern California. They also have worked in Brazil.

Greg Ettl, the director of the Center for Sustainable Forestry at Pack Forest, said the dogs’ presence will give Pack “an immediate higher profile on conservation issues.”

“These dogs are pretty spectacular in what they can do,” he said.

ONE PROJECT NETTED 700 POOP SAMPLES

Laura Finley, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist, hired Wasser and his team to survey fishers in one of their last strongholds in California. The carnivore is a candidate for federal Endangered Species Act listing.

During a six-week period last fall, Wasser’s two scat-tracking dogs collected 700 samples of suspected fisher poop. Their success rate was a big surprise. “We didn’t have near enough money set aside for him to process all those samples,” Finley said.

The results aren’t in yet, but the dogs might turn out to be an effective way to count fishers, she said. Otherwise, she and other scientists must lure the mysterious critters with bait and set up cameras rigged to snap pictures when the bait is snatched, she said.

Next weekend, two scat-tracking dogs will be on assignment seeking floating feces left by orca whales. The dogs will ride the bow of a boat driven by Kelley Balcomb-Bartok of the Center for Whale Research.

The San Juan Island-based center has gathered information on resident killer whales for decades. Federal officials have listed the Puget Sound’s small population of killer whales as endangered. Scientists are still trying to determine why their numbers are decreasing.

DOGS COME FROM PRISON AND SHELTERS

Some of the first dogs Wasser used to track other animals started out in a canine narcotics training program at McNeil Island Correctional Center.

Like drug detection or bomb-sniffing dogs, the scat-trackers are eager to work for chances to play.

“They are so focused on the tennis ball that when you show them the ball, they won’t do anything else,” Wasser said.

Wasser said he and his team of trainers find many of the dogs in shelters, where they are otherwise likely to be put to death because they demand so much from people who care for them.

“These are dogs that drive owners nuts,” he said.

They are also hard to find. “We looked at 1,000 dogs before we sent four to Alberta last year,” Wasser said.

Initially a part-time effort, scat-tracking evolved into a full-time endeavor – with a $1.4 million budget – about a year ago, Wasser said.

The center now employs nine dog handlers. In the next six months, teams will take dogs back to Alberta and to the Sierra Nevada, Wasser said.

ROOM TO GROW AT PACK FOREST

At Pack Forest, Wasser plans to forge ahead with what he hopes will be a groundbreaking way to use the dogs’ keen sense of smell.

The planned kennel will include a loft area where handlers will train the dogs to match poop samples. By figuring out which samples come from the same individuals, researchers can estimate the size of the imperiled population the poop comes from, Wasser said.

Scientists ordinarily identify the feces of individual animals by analyzing the DNA, but that can be prohibitively expensive, Wasser said. He would like to prove that dogs can do it as accurately faster and cheaper.

The move from Seattle is a benefit because the dogs need a better place to train.

“It became important for us to build a facility to meet the demand,” Wasser said.