Imagine being able to taste the sweetness of a tablespoon of sugar that has been dissolved into enough water to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. Such a super-sense is what canines wield as they navigate a smellscape we can scarcely fathom. In the following excerpt from “Eavesdropping on Animals: What We Can Learn From Wildlife Conversations,” author George Bumann, an animal language expert, artist and naturalist, participates in the search-and-rescue training of a border collie–yellow Labrador retriever mix named Chapter. Through the experience, we are given a glimpse into Chapter’s powerful senses — as well as our own connections to the natural world and our place within it.

Bumann’s remarkable guide reveals what our ancestors knew long ago — that tuning in to the owl in the tree, the deer in the gully, and even our canine companions can tell us important information and help us feel connected to our wild community.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Eavesdropping on Animals: What We Can Learn From Wildlife Conversations” by George Bumann, published by Greystone Books, 2024.

Animal Senses

Secondhand knowledge gained through animal senses can be one of the greatest gifts to learning what is going on around us. Making use of the constellation of animal superpowers elevates our awareness severalfold. Even if we can’t see into the ultraviolet spectrum like an insect or respond to weak electrical impulses like a shark or feel fishes’ hydrodynamic trails like a seal, the behavior of other species gives us clues to what is going on in the more-than-human world. Although human olfaction is geared more for sniffing mangos and bananas than for huffing fumes off a drowned bison, as a bear does, for instance, we can ascertain the presence of a hidden carcass by closely watching a bear as it sniffs its way around an icy pond in early spring.

When teaching field-based classes, I sometimes motion with my arm as if waving an imaginary wand. I tell students they have been transformed into bison, coyotes, or harlequin ducks. Participants are then tasked with figuring out how to abide by unseen territorial boundaries, where to select the best grazing sites in a valley under several feet of snow, or when to set off on their continental-scale migrations. How would you navigate without a GPS, map, calendar, or compass? Where should you go and when would you leave? And how will you know when you get there?

Brief as it is, this thought experiment reveals the rift that exists between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Making a living in the wild is not child’s play, and without a trove of learned and inherited knowledge, animals wouldn’t know where to show up for breakfast, where to sleep, where to get a drink, who to trust, and who to avoid, and would probably end up being someone else’s lunch.

To survive in the wild requires superpowers. Some pet owners train their animal partners to hone the abilities they inherited from their wild forebears. Animal companions can understandably give us some idea of the depth of awareness available to their wild cousins and act as useful bridges between what wild and domestic messengers are telling us.

Bound for the mailbox one Saturday morning, my son, young George, and I have a chance encounter with our friend Colette Daigle-Berg. Colette, a former Park Service law enforcement ranger, is conducting search-and-rescue training with her female border collie–yellow Labrador retriever mix, Chapter, and Colette asks us if we would help with the day’s exercises. Although our formal introduction to Chapter is still a few hours away, we happily agree. Chapter’s name reflects the pup’s role in Colette’s life, as she embarked on her next life chapter following her retirement from her Park Service career. For our part, George and I are to create an interference pattern, an olfactory red herring, over a scent trail laid down by Colette’s assistant two hours earlier. In short, we are to complicate an otherwise simple path of odors and make things a bit more challenging for Chapter.

Though we are largely oblivious to it, each of us exists in an ever-present cloud of minute fragments that emanate from us like a microscopic ticker-tape parade.

Though we are largely oblivious to it, each of us exists in an ever-present cloud of minute fragments that emanate from us like a microscopic ticker-tape parade. Our unique clouds are partly composed of the roughly two hundred million skin cells we exfoliate each hour. We all resemble Pigpen, the character from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon with the persistent plume of grime billowing around him—as it billows around all of us, all the time. The chemicals in our sweat, combined with shed hairs, textile fibers, molecules of soap, detergent, and perfume, create a personal scent signature. This odor is a physical extension of our being, and we are leaving a lot of ourselves lying around for someone, or something, else to follow.

Chapter recovers avalanche casualties, drowning victims, and lost hikers for her job, and she depends on the invisible flotsam we generate. At times, the scent particles operate exactly like, well, particles. We might imagine them as minute sticky notes pointing the way. They adhere to the ground or to upright objects such as bushes, buildings, and fences. In other cases, odors behave more like fluids that eddy in, around, behind, and even through some of those very same objects. Scent can pool in low-lying areas such as a pit, a ditch, or a river bottom, and is further altered by each passing breeze.

A couple of hours after young George and I make our contributions to the smell-o-scape by hiking along in normal fashion, Chapter navigates the entire one-mile challenge course with ease. This was a walk in the park for her. Colette later shares with me a single black line on her GPS unit that shows where her human assistant walked through rolling hills and sagebrush, and back down to the road. Colette then shows me a blue line: the path that Chapter took. Chapter’s line lies atop the target person’s path almost exactly. There is a slight bobble at the beginning, where Chapter had to tease out our odors from that of the person she was supposed to find, but then she was off to the races. The only other discrepancies are periodic diversions of a few feet downwind. Chapter also cut off a wide, misleading tangent of about two hundred yards from the end of the exercise when she saw Colette’s assistant standing on the roadside; this, too, is part of the training. In the case of a person teetering on the edge of life, search-and-rescue dogs are taught to leave the scent trail and go straight to the individual whenever possible. 

As Chapter bounds down the dirt embankment and onto the road, young George erupts with a resounding, “Yay, Chapter. You did it!”

None of this would surprise anyone who has worked with scenting dogs. This is routine stuff. What Colette shares with me next, however, really blows my mind. 

Three years before our training run with Chapter, a man parked his car at a trailhead in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and never came back. Colette and several other dog handlers were asked to canvas a specific area in hopes of finding evidence of the missing man. They, too, failed. The hiker’s remains would later be found, based on an anonymous tip, in a spot far outside the established search area. During the search that did take place, Colette said Chapter found something far more unexpected than a lost hiker.

At one point, Chapter began signaling that she had found human scent near the roots of an overturned tree. The dutiful pup did a perfect “refind,” as Colette calls it—a trained response where Chapter places her front paws up on Colette then returns to the source of the scent and lies down next to it. This signal is the dog’s way of saying, “Look here, right here!” Colette could see nothing.

Moving closer to the exposed roots of the tree, Colette still found no evidence of human remains. It seemed as though Chapter might be mistaken for once. And when it appeared that her mom might lose interest and drift away, Chapter did something she had never done before in a situation like this—she barked. Chapter’s outburst was so odd that Colette took out her phone and shot some video footage. She shows me the clip as we talk about the encounter. Still feeling a bit unsure, Colette praised Chapter, rewarded her with a treat, and moved on.

On a hunch, Colette checked in with one of the resource specialists at park headquarters afterward. “Are there, by chance, any Native American burials in that area?” she asked. In a guarded way, the specialist answered in the affirmative. “Yes, yes, there are. We don’t typically talk about them, though.”

What made Chapter’s find so remarkable was that this “lost” person was not from a few years before, or even from this century. This area holds ancestral Puebloan burial sites that date back between eight hundred and twelve hundred years. Chapter was not sensing the recently departed. She was mingling with the ancients. What would it be like to go about your day with the odor of the ancestors from centuries, if not millennia, ago swirling around in your nostrils? The thought is nothing short of dizzying.

Dogs trained to smell cadavers focus on a cocktail of fatty acids emanating from decomposing flesh and bone. Dogs and other species that are hyper-focused on these chemicals can often detect them in concentrations of as little as one part per trillion. To get a handle on what that means, envision dissolving a tablespoon of sugar in a volume of water equivalent to two Olympic-size swimming pools and still being able to taste the sweetness—that is how good they are.

Chapter has put these same skills to use when locating drowning victims beneath dozens of feet of water, and in one case pinpointed a deceased man beneath a foot of river ice: human crews couldn’t locate the victim until they used ground-penetrating (in this case, ice-penetrating) radar. I have always maintained that if we could smell as well as our canine friends can, we would probably be down on our hands and knees sniffing the lawn, rocks, and fire hydrants right alongside them.

Lauri Travis, an associate professor of anthropology at Carroll College in Helena, Montana, has taken advantage of the powers of those canine noses in her paleontology and archeology work. Dogs are commonly used to find drugs and buried bombs, and even to detect estrus in cattle. Lauri is among a small group of researchers harnessing canine noses to learn about the past. Lauri’s work started in 2018 with Hannah Decker, an under-graduate student in zoology at Carroll, and a shelter-rescued border collie–Australian shepherd mix named Dax. At that time, Lauri was working on a ten-acre study site and was permitted to dig no more than three one-meter-by-one-meter test pits to search for artifacts. Their teamwork paid off, as Dax’s nose was able to help narrow down a vast field of possibilities; it would have been a multi-acre roll of the dice otherwise. Dax’s oldest find to date has been a five-thousand-year-old bone buried beneath fourteen inches of soil. No man-made device has yet been able to duplicate such feats.

Imagine extending this sort of lesson from domestic super-sniffers to more of our local wild informants. What else might we be able to find? Entire books are filled with examples of these super-senses from across the zoologic spectrum, and as I write these words, more are being discovered. Elephants decode long-distance, low-frequency vibrations through their feet. Certain migratory birds are probably able to see Earth’s weak magnetic field and use it as a navigational aid. Mice are crooning to their darlings in ultrasonic frequencies. Dolphins are reflecting sound off nearly identical objects to differentiate textures and materials. Eels are able to both stun prey and titillate their mates with their electrical pulses, and the list goes on.

Planet Earth is literally brimming with a faunal cornucopia of sensory talents.

Planet Earth is literally brimming with a faunal cornucopia of sensory talents. Who needs Marvel Comics when the non-humans living in your own house or flowerbed can manage parallel feats? Despite our nifty gadgets and techno smarts, we are no match for biological evolution, which has been picking the winners and killing off the rest across millions of years of research and development. When your life is on the line and dinner is not waiting on the table at the end of a long day, every detail counts. For a lizard that misses the shadow of a hawk slipping across the ground, a butterfly that overlooks the fact that the sun has disappeared behind mounting rain clouds, or a young male deer oblivious to the approach of a larger adversary, the consequences can be severe. Meeting your maker sooner than planned is a real possibility.

We humans have put a lot of effort into our game of one-upmanship with the rest of Earth’s biota, but more than anything, this one-sided view has stifled our ability to see what is actually there. Watch your cat or your parakeet, or the resident opossum or groundhog. Wait until you see it react to some kind of external stimulus. See if you can tell what brought its head to attention. What made it rotate its ears? What elicited a call? Look in the direction it is looking, then listen carefully for what it has heard. Draw air slowly into your nose on the chance that you can catch a whiff of something it found interesting.

I did this with wild turkeys each spring for a period of three or four years, logging each sound that triggered them to gobble. The final count of gobble-inducing noises climbed to over a hundred natural and man-made sounds. The noises ranged from overhead jets and barking dogs to banging car doors and thunder. The diversity of that list speaks to the level of attention turkeys have for their surroundings at all times. Not all of what they noticed was a matter of life or death, but to truly get to know their home, they needed to take it all in. And by watching them and making a note of the stimuli they were responding to, I not only got to see things I would have completely overlooked, but also began, finally, to see the world a little more closely from their point of view.

In a somewhat comical version of secondhand knowing through animal senses, we were sitting in the living room one evening when our Labrador Hobbes suddenly leaped to his feet and uttered a menacing growl in the direction of the kitchen. I rose to my feet to find he was focused on something in the vicinity of the stove. Was Hobbes cornering a phantom menace that was about to pounce? I soon realized that our trusty defender had finally spotted the fresh loaf of bread that Jenny had pulled out of the oven and placed on top of the stove to cool. Good boy, Hobbes.

This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from “Eavesdropping on Animals: What We Can Learn From Wildlife Conversations” by George Bumann, published by Greystone Books, 2024.