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Story by Clayton Stromberger
Photos by Sarah Beal
Along a quiet stretch of roadside on the eastern edge of Bastrop, a man and a dog move side by side in knee-high brush, slowly zigzagging along a fence line.
“Charlie, search!” says the man, gently but firmly. “Find it. Let’s go.”
The black Lab-shepherd mix with intent amber eyes is wearing a blue harness vest hooked to a long plastic leash held loosely by his handler, Clifton Smith. That gives Charlie room to maneuver through the underbrush.
Charlie leads with his nose, swooping in low for extra sniffs, then swivels in a new direction and circles back, like a kid on a scavenger hunt. On a nearby front porch, a man in a weathered gimme cap pauses and squints quizzically at the scene.
It's a typical workday, and Charlie is up to his tail in tall grass, left, as he sniffs for water leaks along Union Chapel Road in Cedar Creek with his handler, Clifton Smith. The pair work for Aqua Water Supply Corp., which serves residents and businesses in a 1,065-square-mile area in six Texas counties, including most of Bastrop County and parts of Travis, Lee, Caldwell, Fayette and Williamson counties.
“Show me,” Smith says to Charlie. “Show me. Where? Search. Find it. Find it. Where’s it at?”
Suddenly Charlie, his tail pointed upward, zeros in on a spot and plants his paws in a quick bow. His eyes flash toward his co-worker. Here! The dog’s subtle “alert” means that somewhere beneath that patch of roadside grass, water is slowly seeping from an Aqua Water Supply Corp. pipe.
“Good boy, good boy!” Smith responds, and from his pocket he produces a slingshot-style ball toy. “Here, go!” and Smith sends the ball whirling across a patch of grass. He drops the leash and Charlie bolts in happy pursuit. While Charlie is playing, Smith marks the spot with a small blue flag.
It’s another successful moment in the field for the Aqua Water’s most unusual full time employee. Charlie, a 2½-year-old rescue dog, is the first working water-leak detection dog in Texas, and one of only four known to be working full-time in the U.S.
Charlie and Smith started working together in May 2021. Their partnership is an innovative new leak-detection approach for the Central Texas water company, which supplies drinking water to rural residents and businesses in a 1,065-square-mile area that includes most of Bastrop County and parts of Travis, Lee, Caldwell, Fayette and Williamson counties.
After one more ball toss and fetch, Charlie and Smith hop back into their Aqua Water Supply vehicle – a silver Tahoe with caution lights on the top and “Aqua K-9” emblazoned on the side – and head down the road for the next service call. The rest of the day’s schedule: Work hard, play hard, rest a bit and repeat, in endless variations.
Later, Aqua Water will send a crew to dig where Charlie hit the spot and repair a leak that could have gone undetected for months.
Leaks are a very common problem in the water delivery industry. “Like every other water utility, we have a large unknown water loss,” says Dave McMurry, Aqua Water’s general manager. “The average across the country is 10 percent to 30 percent annually. That’s a lot of money, so you can justify some expense looking for it.”
Aqua has about 1,900 miles of water line, much of it a foot and a half underground. Leaks can be caused by problems as diverse as aging metal pipes or shifting rocks that grind into newer PVC pipe. Traditional approaches to detecting leaks – acoustic equipment to listen for the hiss of escaping water or infrared cameras – can be hit or miss, and satellite scans seeking water line anomalies are often prohibitively expensive for most regional water companies.
Charlie’s payday comes hourly in the form of his favorite thing: playtime. He has proved to be a good return on Aqua Water’s total investment in him, an estimated $20,000. Since he started working less than a year ago, he and Clifton Smith have located about 150 leaks together.
How does Charlie “smell” water? He doesn’t: He sniffs for chlorine. The federal Environmental Protection Agency requires all public water systems in the U.S. to add a small amount of chlorine (or a chlorine-based disinfectant) to its water. That amount has been deemed safe for water use or consumption. The chlorine kills disease-causing bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms.
As leaking water sinks into the soil, the added chlorine becomes a gas that slowly rises through small air pockets toward the surface. That is what the remarkable scent-analyzing instrument known as Charlie’s nose has been trained to seek and identify.
Across the centuries, humans have trained dogs to do everything from aid in the hunt to herd farm animals to support people with impaired vision or assist police and military. In recent years, dog training has become more targeted toward skills using their stunningly keen sense of smell.
A dog’s nose can be 10,000 to 100,000 times as sensitive as a human’s. They have up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses compared with our 5 million to 6 million, according to research reports. In recent years, service dogs have been trained to sniff out unhealthy blood glucose levels in people with diabetes, cancer from a patient’s breath or, for those with epilepsy, indications of an upcoming seizure before it happens.
Reports of a successfully trained water leak-detecting dog first surfaced in Australia in 2018. Then a second trainee, a cocker spaniel named Snipe, started sniffing out leaks in the United Kingdom.
America’s first leak-detection dog is Vessel, who started working for Central Arkansas Water in 2019. Vessel, also a Lab-shepherd mix, learned his craft from respected Arkansas dog trainers Carrie Kessler and Tracy Owen at the request of the CEO of Central Arkansas Water, who wanted to give this new approach a try.
Heather Tucker, Aqua Water’s conservation manager, read about Vessel and General Manager McMurry asked her to research what it would take to get a leak-detection dog for Aqua. She contacted Kessler and Owen, who already had a perfect candidate: Charlie.
The bouncy 1-year-old rescue pup had been adopted by a family with four children. They loved Charlie, but the family could not keep up with his incessant fixation on playing fetch. He would play for hours without tiring. Trainers call this trait “ball drive” and it is key to Charlie’s specialized training.
Charlie’s owner had heard about trainers Kessler and Owen and their involvement in Arkansas Paws in Prison, which teaches inmates at seven Arkansas prisons how to give basic obedience training to rescue dogs. The family hated saying goodbye to Charlie, but hoped the program would give him a meaningful outlet for his energy.
It worked: Charlie’s fetch fixation and intelligence made him a great candidate for scent training.
Since finding the smell of chlorine was the goal, trainers Kessler and Owen used chlorine in the same way they did with other scent-based training. They slowly guided Charlie toward a Q-tip moistened with city water. When he found that chlorine scent, he got his treasured reward – playing ball. This “imprinting” training gradually moved through stages, with the chlorine becoming harder and harder to sniff out.
The next step was to find the right partner for Charlie, since scent-detection dogs work closely with their handler. “We had hopes for the dog,” Aqua Water’s McMurry recalls, “and I knew that whoever apply we put as the handler had to be very dedicated. Both of them as a team were going to have to prove this concept. I was kind of concerned because I stuck my neck out a little bit.”
Clifton Smith, an 18-year veteran of the company, grew up in the Bastrop area and began working at Aqua right out of high school. He started out running a weed-eater around the smiley-faced water towers and worked his way up to a zone operator and backhoe driver. When Smith heard about the new position, he decided to apply to become Aqua’s first K-9 leak detection specialist.
“Clifton’s very driven too,” says his wife, Erin Smith. “He was excited to have a new challenge. It had never been done before in Texas, and he was excited to be a part of that.” Smith traveled to Arkansas for a week of training. He and Charlie bonded right away.
Charlie’s leak alerts can be subtle. Smith had never trained a dog, and he and Charlie had to form a close working relationship – one that’s still evolving. Smith has regular trouble-shooting conversations with Kessler, Owen and Vessel’s handler Tim Preator in Arkansas.
Charlie lives with Smith, his wife and their three children (and three other pet dogs) at their home near Paige. The Smiths make sure to give Charlie only distilled water in his bowl, as they do with all the other pets, just so he’s not over-exposed to the chlorine smell on his off hours.
Each weekday morning Smith and Charlie hop in the Tahoe, drop the Smith children off at school and begin their workday. Sometimes they respond to a call from a customer who suspects a leak, or they follow up Smith’s hunch about a problem area where a line is known to have issues. Other times Smith cruises along certain stretches of the service area, looking for a tell-tale patch of green amid brown grass.
Charlie’s reputation is growing within the Aqua ranks, McMurry says, as the dog continues to alert in spots where no one suspected a leak. Aqua Water says Charlie is accurate most of the time, and is much more accurate than other leak detection devices.
“The manager of our distribution system at first said, ‘I'll believe it when I see it,’ ” McMurry says. “Charlie's convinced them all. One of them said to me recently, ‘When Charlie says there’s a leak, I dig.’ ”
Charlie has become something of a celebrity around the Aqua service area, with his special brown “working dog” vest. You might see him and Smith at Petco on a pit stop some weekday. He wears the blue leak-detection vest only when he is working. “He knows, once I get that vest out, it’s time for business,” Smith says.
When he isn’t working, Charlie is lovable and gregarious. “He never meets anyone who isn’t a friend,” Smith says of his partner. Once, Smith recalls, Charlie even charmed two Bastrop County Sheriff’s Department officers. They had pulled Smith over, suspicious that he was gallivanting around in a fake K-9 police car.
“I told them about Charlie and what he does, and at first they were like, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ ” Smith recalls. “They ended up taking a lot of photos with him.”
Kessler and Owen in Arkansas now each have their own dog training business, and there are more leak-sniffing dogs under their tutelage. For now, Charlie remains one of a small and select group of dogs doing this work.
No one knows how long Charlie’s career will last. His retirement date is “whenever he decides he doesn’t want to work anymore,” Smith says. Then Charlie would transition to the laid-back lifestyle of a regular pet at the Smiths’ home.
In the meantime, Charlie and Smith continue to develop their unique partnership. Smith works to keep things fun and interesting for Charlie, mixing up which balls he uses each day and working in some treats and tug-toy action. Charlie’s desire to chase a ball hasn’t dimmed. “He’ll play ball until your arm won’t work anymore,” Smith says.
“We talk about the ‘ball drive’ and the ‘food drive’ with these dogs,” he says, “but I think at the core of all of it is that they are really wanting to be pleasers and work for you to make you happy – and when that happens, they get to play.”
THE NOSE KNOWS
Just how good is the sense of smell in a dog like Charlie? Probably much better than you realized:
- He may have a sense of smell up to 100,000 times more acute than a human’s.
- An analogy: If a scent was sugar, a human may notice a cup of coffee has a teaspoon of sugar in it; a scent dog can detect that same teaspoon of sugar in 1 million gallons of water.
- Humans have up to 6 million “olfactory receptors” in our noses. A Lab mix such as Charlie could have 220 million or more receptors.
- The part of a dog’s brain that analyzes smells is 40 times as great (proportionately) as that part in the human brain.
- When a dog inhales, a fold of tissue separates oxygen into two air flows: one for breathing, the other for smelling.
- Dogs can wiggle both nostrils in different ways, and they can determine which nostril a scent came through.
- Dogs have now been trained to successfully smell the COVID-19 virus from a person’s breath or urine. In one study, dogs were 97.5% accurate.
- Scent dogs have been trained not just to sniff out people, cadavers, explosives and drugs, but also diseases (including cancer) and oncoming epileptic seizures, money, invasive plant and animal species, fungi and more.
Sources: NOVA/pbs.org; University of Oslo, Norway; Pennsylvania State University; University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information, PLOS ONE journal; Global Forensic and Justice Center at Florida International University; dog-cognition researcher Alexandra Horowitz, author of “Inside of a Dog”
BEST BREEDS FOR SCENT SKILLS
Not all dogs are created equal. These are the breeds with the best senses of smell.
Bloodhound
At the top of most lists, this breed is sometimes called “a nose with a dog attached.’’ The bloodhound has the largest olfactory cortex (40 times as large as a human’s) and 300 million scent receptors (more than any other scent dog). It can follow a scent for days and the loose skin around its face and long drooping ears trap scent particles. It is the first animal whose evidence is admissible in some U.S. courts.
Basset hound
A low-slung stature keeps their wrinkled faces and long ears close to the ground to enhance ability to follow a scent. Originally bred by French monks during the Middle Ages to hunt hares, basset hounds underwent more breeding in Great Britain in the 1800s. A close second to the bloodhound in scent-trailing ability.
Beagle
A lot of energy in a small package, the beagle was bred for hunting prey through forests. It has 225 million scent receptors in the nose, equal to the much larger German shepherd. In contrast, a dachshund has 125 million scent receptors, and humans have a mere 5 million to 6 million. Beagles are used by law enforcement and to sniff out drugs, bombs and illegal food imports.
German shepherd
Bred to be a herding dog but better as a scent detector, the German shepherd tracks scents in the air as well as near the ground. It’s particularly good at tracking human scents. A longtime favorite of police, military and others for bomb detection and search-and-rescue skills, it can also be an excellent service dog and excel in obedience trials. The German shepherd is the second most popular breed in the U.S. after Labrador retrievers.
Labrador retriever
Originally bred to help fish catchers in Newfoundland pull nets and retrieve fish, Labs are also America’s favorite dog. They are used for all manner of scent tasks, including search and rescue, explosive detection, and, more recently, to sniff out cancer and other diseases by smelling breath or urine. Labs are intelligent and typically easily trained.
Belgian Malinois
Agile and weighing less than a German shepherd, the Malinois was originally bred to herd. It can track people or substances, leap, pull sleds and excel in agility courses. For more than 100 years, it has been used by police and military for sniffing out contraband and other tasks. It is favored by Navy SEALS as trained parachutists and repelling attacks, and several Malinois protect the grounds of the White House.
Sources: National Center for Biotechnology Information, Family Dog Project detection test report, American Kennel Club, biologydictionary.net
Download this story as it appeared in the Texas Co-op Power magazine
Story by Clayton Stromberger
With a patient skritch skritch skritch skritch, Sandra Matthijetz slowly moves the tip of a small retractable knife over the shiny surface of an emerald-colored chicken egg. She scrapes off narrow layers of dye, creating concentric oval patterns where the white shell of the egg peeks through.
“You just keep working at it,” Matthijetz says of her freehand creation. A dyed chicken egg is a small canvas with no eraser, which means she has to cheerfully incorporate any slips of the scratching tool. “Sometimes you start a design and something goes haywire, so then you have to come up with a new design.” She laughs and gently continues scraping, steadying the egg in her left hand.
Matthijetz, 74, is fashioning a unique Easter egg at the Texas Wendish Heritage Museum in Serbin. She is carrying on a rich tradition that her Wendish ancestors brought with them to southern Lee County in Central Texas more than a century and a half ago. The Wends, or Sorbs as they are known in Central Europe, are a Slavic people who for centuries have lived near the area where the current borders of eastern Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet. They have never had their own country, but speak their own language – Wendish, or Sorbian. In the fall of 1854, nearly 600 Wends who sought religious and cultural freedom from what they viewed as repressive measures of the Prussian government left their homes in the Lusatia region of Europe to relocate in Texas. They followed the trail of a small group of Wendish immigrants who arrived in Texas the previous year. This hardy Lutheran congregation eventually formed the community of Serbin — or “Sorbian land” in Wendish — about 6 miles southwest of Giddings.
Eggs are a symbol of new life and renewal throughout the world, and archaeologists have found fragments of decorated ostrich eggs dating back at least 65,000 years. Crafting elaborately designed and colorful eggs for springtime is an ancient Slavic tradition, with slightly varied styles appearing in cultures throughout the region, from the Wends in eastern Germany to Russia. In Wendish culture, decorated eggs are created throughout the year in preparation for Easter, and play a key role in rites of spring, including children’s games and gift giving.
A basket of Wendish eggs can be as breathtaking as a Texas countryside meadow bursting with spring wildflowers — a dazzling array of bright reds, rich yellows, forest greens and indigo blues.
They feature intricate swirls, radiating lines, floral patterns and complex mosaic-like arrangements with multiple layers of dye coloring. No two eggs are alike and each can take hours to create.
Wendish eggs are a significant enough cultural tradition to be on permanent exhibit at the Institute of Texan Cultures, which is part of the University of Texas at San Antonio. The institute’s website includes a photo of a dozen decorated Easter eggs and a video featuring the “anthem of the Lusatian Sorbs,” sung in Sorbian. Go to bit.ly/3uSE7sL to see it.
If you’ve ever spent a spring day tinkering with dyeing Easter eggs, you may appreciate the four basic approaches the Wendish use in this folk art form. Two involve the application of color, and two involve the removal of color to reveal the eggshell.
For layering on color, wax batik is the most common technique. The egg is either “blown” — its contents carefully removed through small holes in each end — or hardboiled. Barnyard eggs are preferred because they are hardier than store-bought eggs.
Clear melted wax is applied in a pattern on the egg, often using the tip of a specially cut feather from a goose, duck or chicken. When dying the egg, colors are added from lightest to darkest. After each color dries, another wax design is added and the next color applied. After all designs and colors are applied, wax is melted over a candle and wiped away with a soft cloth to reveal an egg of multiple designs and colors.
Embossing, another technique for applying color, involves carefully painting the egg with colored wax, which can add a beautiful bead-like effect.
For removing color, the scratch technique involves sharp tools to scrape dye from an eggshell. The acid technique uses sauerkraut juice, vinegar — or, for experienced artisans, diluted muriatic acid — to paint away dye. The method produces a more watery-edged pattern.
Most Wendish decorators use chicken eggs or slightly larger goose eggs, because they’re easy to obtain and handle. In Germany, some Wendish egg artists seek a larger canvas and decorate 6-inch-long ostrich eggs. These prized creations can fetch top dollar each spring at the Easter markets in the Lusatia area of Germany.
Matthijetz was not steeped in Wendish tradition while growing up in the 1950s in Winchester, 10 miles south of Serbin. She was born nearly a century after her ancestors had set down new roots near Rabbs Creek in Fayette County, not far from Giddings. The Wendish language and cultural traditions were fading as the people spread out across Central Texas and assimilated.
The elders in Matthijetz’s family spoke German, so she thought of herself as a descendent of German immigrants. She recalls her grandfather’s brother reading unusual words aloud from a Wendish Bible, and her mother’s aunt creating beautifully decorated eggs at Easter.
“But those eggs were hard boiled, so they didn’t stick around. They got eaten,” she laughs.
Matthijetz left Winchester for big-city life in Houston after graduating from La Grange High School in 1965. She didn’t have many occasions to ponder the ways of the Wends until decades later.
“I didn’t really think of myself as Wendish until the Wendish Museum got started and I became interested in my heritage,” Matthijetz says.
The Texas Wendish Heritage Museum opened in Serbin in 1979. It grew out of the founding of the Wendish Culture Club in 1972 by a group of Lee County women eager to share their heritage at the Texas Folklife Festival in San Antonio. In 1989 the museum began hosting its annual Wendish Fest every fourth Sunday in September, an event that, in pre-pandemic days, would draw up to 2,000 people. The Fest was canceled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but returned in 2021 and is scheduled again for 2022.
As people of Wendish ancestry in Germany learned about the event, some began visiting Texas to see this unique Lone Star hub of their cultural heritage. One Wend, Kornelia Thor of Leipzig, visited in 2000 and then returned each fall throughout the decade to offer egg-decorating demonstrations at the festival. That sparked Matthijetz’s interest.
The two women became good friends, and Matthijetz and her husband Raymond — also from Winchester and a descendant of early Wend settlers — began visiting Thor in Germany. Together they toured the region’s traditional Easter markets, where countless decorated Wendish eggs are sold.
“In Germany, the Wendish people there grow up with this tradition,” Matthijetz says. “At the Easter markets, they have a room where the children are all decorating eggs. The young kids are able to use the hot wax and not get burned.”
Thor’s connection with the Texas Wendish Heritage Museum is still going strong. She decorates and mails about 200 decorated eggs each year to be sold in the gift shop. Chicken eggs are $25 and the larger goose eggs are $40. There are plenty available year-round. There are eggs with traditional patterns as well as some with a Texas twist, such as bluebonnets or an image of the Ben Nevis, the ship that carried the Serbin-area settlers from Liverpool to Galveston in 1854. You can also see Thor’s work on her German website, ostereierladen.com, which is German for “Easter egg shop.”
For those interested in trying out this Wendish tradition, the museum in Serbin sells a $31 egg-decorating kit with some basic tools and includes a copy of the small, self-printed book, “The Art of Decorating Wendish Easter Eggs,” by Daphne Dalton Garrett. Garrett, who was a longtime resident of Warda just southeast of Serbin, did much to revive Wendish cultural traditions in the area before she died in 2001. The museum also brings in Matthijetz for an egg-decorating workshop when enough people are interested; contact the museum for more information.
Matthijetz and her husband moved back to Winchester in 1998 after she retired from her career as an administrative assistant at a Houston manufacturing firm. To folks at the museum in Serbin, she is a local treasure — always ready to dress in a traditional Sorbian folk costume and share her passion for this unique living connection to another time and place.
“It’s important for the tradition of the eggs to continue so that we have a link back to our ancestors,” says Marian Wiederhold, an area resident of Wendish ancestry and longtime museum librarian and docent. She and Matthijetz are fourth cousins.
Matthijetz may be among the only practitioners of the folk art tradition of Easter egg decorating still living in the Serbin area. She is eager to do what she can to keep the storied tradition rolling on in this area where her ancestors first experienced a Texas springtime.
WAX BATIK
Texas Wends’ most common technique; delicate wax design applied to egg using trimmed tip of feather or head of straight pin (color doesn't adhere to waxed areas); wax dries and egg is dyed with lightest color; egg dries, second wax design applied and egg dyed again in slightly darker color; design continues until final darkest dye; wax melted with candle and wiped away.
ACID-ETCHED
Artist's pen with stainless steel fine point is filled with 50% muriatic acid/50% water; design drawn on dyed egg to expose white shell; in the past, sauerkraut juice or vinegar were used, but muriatic acid mix is preferred now; best technique for creating quick, clear designs.
SCRATCHED
Made by scratching away color from a dyed egg using a small, sharp instrument, such as a nail or thin tip of a knife; a slow process that carries risks because too much pressure by the decorator can puncture egg.
EMBOSSED
Similar to wax batik method except colored wax (pure beeswax is preferred) is painted onto an egg and is not removed after egg is dyed.
Learn to speak a little Wendish
The Wends are a Slavic people from East Germany near Bautzen and Cottbus in the upper Spree River valley, an area long known as Lusatia. They have their own language, Sorbian, which is divided into two dialects, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. The Wends never had an independent nation and were surrounded by Germans. Here are a few words, as taken from the book ‘‘A Practical Grammar of Upper Sorbian (Wendish)’’ by Charles Wukasch. The book is sold at the Wendish museum.
English: Good morning!
Sorbian: Dobre ranje!
Pronounced: DOE-beh RON-yay!
English: Good night
Sorbian: Dobry dżeń
Pronounced: DOE-bray zhen
English: Thank you!
Sorbian: Dźakuju so wam!
Pronounced: JOCK-you-you so wam!
English: Goodbye
Sorbian: Božemje
Pronounced: BOWSHIM-yay
English: Please!
Sorbian: Prošu!
Pronounced: PRO-zue!
