Dog smart collar helps find yellow jacket nest after Charlotte couple swarmed on trail

Jennifer and Jason Puca were swarmed by yellow jackets when the couple decided to walk their dog on a trail near their Steele Creek NC home. “It was traumatic,” Jennifer told the Observer Thursday. “It was super scary.”

The yellow jackets attacked the couple because their 1-year-old vizsla Zoe disturbed an underground nest during their afternoon walk two weeks ago, Jennifer said.

The couple realized that Zoe’s Fi GPS tracking collar shows where she was running around that day. When they found out the exact location of the nest using Zoe’s collar, maintenance closed down the trail and destroyed the yellow jacket nest, Jennifer said. “Hopefully we prevented this from happening to somebody else,” she said.

Jennifer and Zoe didn’t get hurt, but Jason was stung multiple times and went to the emergency room. “They were all over his back, all over his legs,” Jennifer said, “and he got stung a couple times on the face.”

Jason is recovering and doing well, she said. He had seven stings around one of his ankles and one of his eyes was swollen shut.