Looking for Ekko Overnight

So we put together a pretty good plan to place ourselves in Ekko's regular path, which we know about from having Sam & Salsa with Pure Gold Pet Trackers out to trail his scent -- a couple of times, showing that Ekko is doing pretty much the same loop.

We had 1-2 volunteers out at 4 sites from 12 midnight to 5am, each of which could support a feeding station and eventually a trap. Each team recieved a briefing at their site by a volunteer that had been along for both of the tracks with PGPT, describing anything specific to know about the site -- such as where Ekko should be coming from and where he should go from there -- as well as the whole plan for the night. A dish of McDonalds cheeseburgers was placed at each site. A couple of rovers checked in at each site periodically, and eventually relieved a team that needed to retire before 5am.

All volunteers had everyone's cell phone, ready to call the next site when he passed their site, to alert them that he should be coming upon their site. One site was situated such that it would have been helpful to have more eyes on him once he showed up, so the plan was to call the rovers when he showed up (as was the plan for everyone), and have the volunteers from the furthest site leave it, and come to that site, to have more people observing him. The weather cooperated, no rain, and in fact it was beautiful. There were no suspicious characters at any site, no cops suspicious of our volunteers, no trouble at all.

And no Ekko.

There was one site where a lot of the food was eaten by the end of the night -- it little bit by each hourly check of the food, and it doesn't seem that it was Ekko. There was another site where one of the volunteers did see an animal -- larger than say a raccoon -- dark and with legs and it could have been Ekko, that appeared briefly from what seemed like nowhere, take some of the food from one of the two dishes at that site, then hurry away. "Nowhere" was actually the W&OD trail, cutting through some woods, so in that regard it could have been Ekko. But in that setting, there was no one around (the volunteers were a good distance from it but still had a clear visual shot of it) so we wouldn't expect him to be hurrying as the animal was, and to leave so much of the food behind. So we're very unsure that it was Ekko. And there was a couple of hours left of the operation at that point -- 3am -- and he was not observed anywhere else at all.

So, it was a good plan which we will repeat tonight, and hopefully this time he'll be out when we are. It seems that he should be since he is using routes that are heavily traveled during the day, making it less likely that he could travel safely and freely and without resulting in sightings. And of course the heat of the day is so much harder for a black dog to do.

We have a few openings for tonight's operation if we're going to have the full coverage we had last night, so please contact me ASAP if you can participate for any time between midnight and 5am.

Nancy Despeaux