Waging a decades-long battle against spartina grass

Strolling along New River Estuary between November and May you may have seen two dogs – snouts down, orange vests on, and their handlers Graeme Miller and John Taylor, and wondered what they were doing.

The men are contractors, who with their dogs, undertake work as part of a decades-long battle against spartina grass, an invasive weed species that once threatened to choke the life out of the estuary.

Back in the 1990s, the New River Estuary was overrun. Spartina grass had spread across an estimated 800 hectares, forming dense meadows that smothered native habitats and pushed out the feeding grounds of 56 bird species.

Graeme joined the Department of Land and Surveys in 1973, which became the Department of Conservation in 1987. He worked in weed control and when others said nothing could be done to fix the spartina problem in the estuary, he took it as a personal challenge.

“Most of this inlet would have been covered. It went out two to three hundred metres into the estuary and right down towards Bluff,” he says.

The early days of the fight were gruelling. Graeme and his team waded through knee-deep mud, hand-spraying plants in a hostile environment.

“It was not a pleasant place,” he says. “But we did that for years.”

Eventually, innovation arrived and a breakthrough chemical gave the team a fighting chance. Helicopters sprayed 70 to 80 hectares annually. Slowly, the tide began to turn.

But the final phase of the battle, hunting down the last stubborn plants, required a new kind of soldier. Enter John Taylor, a retired motor mechanic and electrician turned dog trainer. His journey began with Rusty, a dog trained first to detect people during Land and Search Rescue missions, then to detect velvetleaf, another invasive plant. When DOC needed help with spartina, John stepped up.

“I said, ‘get me the plant and I’ll find a dog,’” John says.