absent without trace

My apologies to any readers I might have left after six months of absence.  I have no excuse other than being busy with dogs.  All three of the Amigos is doing well:

*Momo at seven-going-on-eight continues to rock it in his own way, winning a 3rd place in AWGD just two weeks ago, but after guiding two hunts back-to-back with him in December, 6 hours and 33 retrieves later, even he had to admit he was tired.
*Jozsi, going-on-six, is his usual bag of nuts.  There'll be more below about him, but he is still exciting, infuriating, and 2 retrieving points shy of his FC.
*Jake, just-over-two, is looking really really nice.  He actually took a placement in his first broke-dog stake in October and has been out of the ribbons since, but I'll say more about that later in the post.  This trial year, 2012-2013, is about him learning to apply all the lessons he got in summer camp out on the trial field and becoming a truly broke dog.

But I love how each dog is telling me more about myself, as a trainer, as a handler, even as a judge.

I don't remember which trial it was in the fall, but Jozsi had laid down a good run, not a great run, but that included him staying fully broke even when his bracemate appeared over a berm ahead of him and ripped out the bird in front of him.  He was the second reserve dog for the retrieve callbacks -- which were a giant cluster, birds missed but dogs sent, birds flushing wild before the dog was pointed, the whole nine yards -- but three dogs failed their retrieve and he got to go down to the shooting field.  His chukar was the eighth chukar slept in exactly the same spot, a bird slept so hard that when Jozsi went over to it, he didn't point, but actually made two attempts to put it in his mouth before it woke up and flew off.  But it set me to thinking -- and not just about how I might train around this scenario, but why he had done it, and how I as a handler could minimize the possibility of him doing it again.

I was reading Tom Huggler's A Fall of Woodcock (1996) and he records a fascinating observation made by one of his Louisiana hunting partners: "Ever notice how dead birds are harder to find than crippled birds? That's because dead birds don't breathe. A dog can smell a live bird's breath." (p.145)  Donald McCaig has a new book, Mr and Mrs Dog (2013), which is fabulous and in which while talking about border collies and sheep herding (and not bird dogs), he says:

"By human standards, I know far more than the dogs do.  But Luke and June can do what I cannot.  In a millisecond, forty feet from just-encountered range Rambouillets the dogs see, big as a Wall Drug bill board, which sheep is the leader.  They immediately understand the complex social order in this particular mini-flock.  They know whether the sheep are ready to fight, split up, or break for the tall timber, because the sheep tell them what they mean to do." (pp. 102-103)

At times, Jozsi is a blockhead and at other times, he is smarter than I deserve.  And the fact I've come to realize is that when you dizzy a bird so hard, especially perhaps if you tuck its head under a wing, it no longer smells like an awake bird.  Maybe as Tom Huggler's friends assert, the dog can smell the inhalation and exhalation of breath, maybe it's that the now very-slowly breathing bird is simply not producing and wafting scent like a live, healthy bird -- but in any case, Jozsi knew that something wasn't right and he meant to fix it.

Back in February, we took what for us was an unusual February vacation -- we stayed in the U.S. and took the dogs.  It did snow a little while we were down in southwest Virginia so I don't feel we compromised entirely by avoiding the cold weather, but it was neat to take a vacation with the Three Amigos in a spot where Meg could take a swim, hike, and get a massage, where we could eat great food, and where the dogs could stay with us and I could hunt the snot out of them.  Primland is a great spot and proud of its pheasant hunting in particular -- but the thing to keep in mind is that they host a fair number of English-style driven shoots a year and they put out twice as many birds as the hunt guarantees.  Interestingly, they guarantee that their guide will get you at least eight shootable birds (if you miss, it's on you) -- but what it meant for me and the Gentlemen was that there were a lot of hold-over resident birds and those wouldn't hold worth a damn for a dog that wanted to fool around.  In his first hour, Jozsi, for example, had at least 15 contacts and didn't get a bird successfully pointed at all.  I had explained to the folks at Primland that I wanted to run each of my dogs for an hour, would use a blank pistol on almost all the birds for Jozsi and Jake, and would shoot the heck out of any birds for Momo.  And when most of the guides saw how Jozsi and Jake ran, several elected to stay in their trucks.

While many trainers and training books will encourage you to work a dog just long enough and to leave on a positive note to avoid over-stressing the dog and leaving a pleasant memory in their brains (and Ken's own take on it isn't one I disagree with), it occurred to me that perhaps what Jozsi was missing wasn't lots of short, successful repetitions but deep, deep, prolonged work.  This was something Bill Gibbons had tried to convey to me back at summer camp in 2010 -- but which has been hard to repeat and which I had lost sight of.  And for that first hour, he got to watch over a dozen pheasant fly off due to his clumsiness and got cued firmly to stop-to-flush (even if he had).  We had several hunts booked during our time, so I knew he would get many opportunities to try again.  By his second hour, he had successfully pointed three birds in his hour, all of which I shot; by the third, I shot my limit of birds over him.  And his tail was beginning to look just beautiful again -- the sad part being that we only had a limited time to pursue this kind of deep, grinding work with him.  But this was one of his final points during our time at Primland and he sure liked nice.

Pheasants had been Jake's undoing in the fall, too -- having access to a site like Flaherty that is field-trial-first is great, but I should have remembered that come October and November the State of Connecticut starts to dump out pheasants for the weekday hunters. This picture is also from our trip to Primland with Jake pinning a rooster on the other side of the pine.  This fall, especially, has been about getting Jake experience to round all the work we did last summer when I broke him out -- and in return, he has made me think about all kinds of different issues as a handler.  For example, while it sounds dumb to say it, I was reminded to 'trust the dog' because even if he did point where a heron had just been during the previous weekend's trial, and even if he is apparently pointing in a spot you wouldn't have expected anyone to have planted a bird, a point is a point.  Just because it's not on the normal menu of planted quail spots doesn't mean it's not an exhausted woodcock or, as it happened, a pheasant dropped off a truck the night before.  Jake is also the first dog I've truly needed a scout for, as opposed to simply someone to handle my horse while I work the birds he's pointed.  He is a dynamic dog who has on at least three occasions outrun the standard bird-planting schematic used by most clubs with limited numbers of volunteers.  And so, as a handler, do you hack your dog onto the line that you know birds have been planted on? or do you let him make beautiful casts into the spots where wild birds really should be, knowing that unless you're either lucky to have had a liberated quail scuttle off there or a random wild bird or an enlightened bird-planter, you are more than likely going to go birdless?

But it has been a very busy past six weeks.  I was honored to be asked to serve as the reporter for the Masters Open Quail Championship, one of the top-tier all-age trials, held down in the mecca of wild quail habitat, Albany, GA.  Make no mistake about it, these are wild birds but on absolutely privately-owned and heavily managed land. Fortunately there are still enough major landowners that enjoy bird-dogs and understand that well-mannered field trial dogs make wild birds wilder -- and so are willing to host major championships like this.  And for the opportunity to see 53 of the best pointers and, arguably, the single best setter in the country, I am grateful to the Southern Field Trial Club and the Montcastle family (who owns the Blue Springs Plantation) and Mr. Ted Turner (who owns the Nonami Plantation) for making that possible.  As the previous sentence implied, I was lucky to see the newest National Champion, Shadow Oak Bo, as well as the 2009 National Champion, Lester's Snowatch, and the 2010 National Champion, In the Shadow -- and despite commendable performances from all three, this year's Master's was claimed by Big Sky Pete (in what I believe was his first major championship title).  As I noted when I first reported the Armstrong-Umbel back in 2011, to call it an eye-opener was something of a misonmer -- because like the dogs coursing the grouse woods guided by voice and bell, 'watching' an all-age dog run in the undulating, unrelenting quail cover was hard to do.  And it added a whole new appreciation for what is truly a tri-partite team: dog, handler, and scout. The picture is of Larron Copeland's Showtime Charlie Chan after his impressive four-find race.

In news just in: I will be interested to follow how, or who, Robin Gates trains up as his new scout -- and to see father and son compete head-to-head now that Hunter has taken a position of his own at Mill Pond Plantation in Thomasville.

Three weeks after the Master's I headed out to Colorado to serve as Captain of the Guns for my FTFG ('field trial fairy godmother'), Joan Heimbach, the chair of this year's VCA National Gun Dog Championship.   I had gunned for the GSPCA NAGDC last year and was looking forward to the opportunity to do it again.  But no matter how much you psych yourself down for it, it is still not just shooting birds over dogs -- I hate to miss and I don't like excuses -- but worrying about gallery wagons, the gallery, handlers, dogs that break on the shot, in addition to riding every brace is hard work.  And, of course, the truism is still holding true: the easy shots are the ones you miss, the hard ones the ones you make.  While I rode every brace we had three other rotating gunners, and with exception of the guy who took the fewest shots (who didn't miss a single bird), all of us missed something.  After riding 4.5days straight on four different horses at the Masters, I feel qualified to say that the horse that pitched me twice was perhaps not quite ready to be a field trial horse.  Like my ego, my tailbone is bruised -- but no major damage done.

It was nice to see some old friends and to meet new ones -- like my fellow Scot, Laura Miller, with her very nice dog, Bull, and Ken Kuivenhoven who has been running Rod Michaelson's Bailey.  Bailey did a respectable job at the NGDC, but was simply beaten by dogs with more.  Clearly no-one had informed the old dogs that they were eligible for senior discounts: Ruger, Topper, and Octane, all beyond ten years old, ran like they would not be forgotten. I am very happy to say that I shot Ocky's bird for him and he was clearly very happy to bring it back to Joan.  Between seeing these seniors lay it down and the really, really strong Puppy stake, it was so encouraging as a statement for the health of the breed.  It was also neat to be there to see Ken Kuivenhoven blush as Vetelytars Tuff as Leather's name, Tucker, was called as the winner of this year's National Gun Dog Championship.

*******

The sad news from that NGDC weekend was the news that, however peacefully, cancer had finally taken Upwind Shenipsit Rebel, aka Yogurt, the VCA's Gun Dog of the Year for 2007 and 2008.  With Yogurt's owner, Patrick Cooke, and her breeder, Lisa DeForest, both now also passed, it feels like something of the end of an era.  But here's the story that ties them all together.

In the fall of 1999, Patrick was still primarily a German Shorthair owner and had gone with his trainer, Deb Goodie, to see his first field trial.  Deb was braced with Lisa, while Patrick walked behind in the gallery.  At the end of the stake, he was chatting with Deb about how it had gone -- as it turned out, his puppy Torii would take 4th in her first trial, while Lisa's Garcie would be awarded the blue ribbon for 1st.  Nevertheless, he was puzzled and asked Deb, "Why was that woman calling her dog Yogurt?," when he knew from the running order that the dog's name was Upwind Very Garcia.  It turned out that what he misheard from the gallery was Lisa singing her dog around the course with "Yo! Girl!"  Patrick decided two things that day, that if he became a field trial vizsla owner, he would only get a dog from Hank Rozanek or Lisa DeForest -- and when "Yogurt" was born two years later, he named her that because it was how he would always remember Lisa and his introduction to the breed.

back into the thick of things

It has been a busy six weeks -- as most of you who follow this blog could probably guess from the delay since the last posting.  We had a great time up at Julie & Gordon's farm this summer and got a lot done with all the dogs.

But before summer camp ended, I hauled the entire crew down to Crane WMA for the VCCNE + Mayflower GSP Club double-header hunt test -- for Jackson and Rye to try their luck at their first two JH legs and for Capo to try her luck at her first two MH legs (and for me to judge a couple of stakes).

The short version is that I quickly remembered that Capo is really only 2.5yrs old and, relatively speaking, hasn't seen a ton of birds and so, while broke, getting her exposed and proofed to all the random scenarios that come with the hunt test format just hasn't happened yet.  Julie ran her in her first leg and I don't have a clear picture of exactly how it came to pass, suffice to say there was a bird in the air and she was moving after it; I ran her in her second leg and when her bracemate stopped-to-flush on a covey of 6-8 birds, she didn't recognize the situation as a stop-to-flush situation and kept moving.  (She did then go on to honor, stop-to-flush, and then point so it wasn't all wasted.)  But what our little whizz-kid really needs is a season of having birds shot over her to really get her primed for the hunt test big-time.

I handled Jackson in his first JH leg so that he understood that even this was a new venue and he had already seen his father on the grounds the same rules applied.  And he did a really nice job both for me -- and for Jeremy the next day.  I gather he and Jeremy will try to complete the JH title next weekend at the CVVC + Nutmeg hunt test double-header.

To look forward a little and condense things, Rye did a great job out on the Cape and then again at the Vizsla Club of Long Island hunt test out at the Sarnoff Preserve in far eastern Long Island.  I had already agreed to judge and while it meant a lot of driving to pick her up and drop her off, I was eager to get her back out on birds and hopefully finish her title.  Which she did.  It was the first time I had been to the Sarnoff grounds, but it was a great place for an energetic, but still moderate ranging dog to do her stuff.  And she looked as fabulous on point as she did in the previous post.  And as can be seen, the VCLI has fabulous ribbons for those finishing titles at their test.

Momo also got to run as a bye-dog and I was able to run Jozsi and Jake on the grounds after the test.  I have to admit that I am not sure how they run horseback trials at Sarnoff because it seems like your maximum vista is about 100yds and Jake, especially, was out of sight quickly and took some hollering to keep him on track and away from roads.

The rest of this fall is really about two things: trying to get plenty of horseback experience for Jake in trial settings and trying to finish up the final 2 points on Jozsi's Field Championship.  My work schedule has gone a little funky so in order to do that, I've had to sacrifice our usual trip to western Maine to hunt the rumpled grouse.  But hopefully, the additional experience will prove beneficial if not successful for both of them.

*******

Here's a quick salute to Upwind Tonka Geode now called back to the second series of both the 2011 and 2012 VCA National Field Championships.  At least for the 2011 edition, "only dogs with flawless manners on game and good ground pattern were considered for the second series."  'Rocko,' as he is known, is our Jozsi's full brother from the last litter that Lisa DeForest bred;  I happen to think he and Jozsi look very similar in terms of their profile.  I am so pleased that, like Rye, after an initial hiccup or two, he is also performing at the very highest level. Thanks to Phil Stout of WindDance Vizslas for this photograph from this year's second series -- and congratulations to Phil, Tori, and Jamie Fountain for their selection to the second series as well.  And heaven knows, all three of these dogs are just hitting their prime years and so hopefully all of them will have this opportunity again.

wrapping things up

 We're moving into our final week of camp and things are starting to come together for all the dogs -- in some way or other.  Since I last wrote, Jeremy dropped off Jackson for two weeks of camp in anticipation of the VCCNE/Mayflower doubleheader hunt test down at Crane WMA this coming weekend (and in anticipation of his own wedding the following weekend).  And while I wish I could claim to have really set up this picture this way, sometimes you just get lucky: from near to far, Jackson, Rye, Capo, Momo, and Jozsi.

Jack has enough strength and drive that he has caught a few (too many) birds and so I am working on having him establish a meaningful, deliberate point for at least as long as a judge can see him.  In my opinion, I don't have enough time and he has too much drive to try any kind of 'pre-breaking' and so have been using good-flying pigeons in launchers that I set off as soon as he breaks point.  I'm hoping that somewhere in his tiny, tiny mind there is a light going off that says 'movement = no chance'.  I am also working him on coming back to me at a suitable point after he's chased the bird in the hope that we can keep a handle on him in the JH birdfield.  I may not even try him on quail before we head down there with the goal of having him not catch any more birds before the test.

Rye has proven that she certainly has an inner bird dog -- and that she is pretty damn smart and has a dominant personality.  I'm pretty sure that she has transitioned from blinking birds to pointing birds in launchers to blinking launchers, that she isn't gun shy, and that she has the capacity to point like a champ.  She has a couple more days to go after quail up at camp and then we'll see what she does down on the Cape.  But having an 'Amy Winehouse' (a rehab dog that someone else has already fussed with and confused) has been an interesting challenge in terms of trying to figure out how and where she became seemingly indifferent about birds and then trying to stoke her bird drive all over again. I ran her this morning and am having a minor 'moral' dilemma about posting a picture of a dog I don't own before her owners get a chance to -- but here she is, tail fuzzed out in the middle, and staunch.

I have been trying to put the polish on Capo for her MH debut at the hunt test -- working her with another dog to get her into backing situations, giving her retrieve practice, making her heel away from a find to avoid a delayed chase.  Here is Momo backing the Princess in the quail pasture.  It has been interesting doing this with her in part because I have seen the competitive side of her personality -- which also inclines her to make mistakes that she might otherwise not normally do.  But one of the reasons I am so fond of her (and of Jake, too) is the relative calm with which they take corrections and bounce right back, eager to get on with the next task and do it right.

I have been working Jozsi out by having him pull cables every third day or so -- although the one piece of equipment I wish I'd been able to scrounge up for this summer is an ATV so that I could give more dogs a more structured exercise program, particularly on their off-bird days.  Jake, Capo, and Jozsi, for example, have pretty similar gaits and cruising speeds; Momo and Rye would have paired up nicely as another team.  It would also have saved my ankles somewhat: I figure I walk about 8miles a day, a lot of it in rubber boots with little ankle support.  I also need to remember that the dogs are running in hay fields and that chest-high timothy and alfalfa provide plenty of resistance training as well!

I don't remember where I picked up this tip regarding exercising dogs, but I've seen plenty of evidence of its validity this summer that it's worth restating.  Heat, by itself, won't necessarily hurt a dog, but the combination of heat and humidity will definitely sap a dog's energy and endurance.  This is to say that asking a dog to run full-out in 95degs in TX without having adequate water on hand to cool and rehydrate them is irresponsible; but having water on-hand won't do a lot for a dog trying to work full out in 70degs and 80% humidity.  The magic number I've heard some place is 140 -- as the combined total of temperature and humidity --  and which I like for a couple of reasons: there is no elaborate heat index formula to calculate, and it seems a more accurate predictor of low temperature exertion.  While it might sound ridiculous to think that your dog would somehow get exhausted early running in 60deg weather, if you're on the verge of a thunder storm you'll watch them get tired in front of your eyes.  (Thanks to Joe for sending me this interesting link to the Canine Hydration Calculator -- which in turn led me to this animal physiology course on canine thermoregulation.) 

Jake the Snake has been doing great -- and has transitioned from pigeons to quail, and from running wearing his full uniform of pinch-collar, checkcord, and e-collar to running free.  He's certainly not perfect, but happily he seems to fully understand his corrections and bounce right back with a clarity of purpose.  While I have deliberately not been running him in the woods, he did take himself in there the other day and had to be cued to stop-to-flush on a woodcock that burst out of the woodline.  While the johnny-house quail are not as dynamic as either the woodcock or grouse in the woods, that itself becomes a training asset for a dog that is relatively far along in the breaking process -- because while they might ultimately fly under enough pressure, flushing them can often be quite theatrical and the temptation high for a dog.

clearing the hurdles

To start here's a picture of the entire crew staked out under the big willow tree -- and which includes Capo's sister, Moxie, and Rye's son, Waylon.  It's been great to have Rob + Kacey be so close to bring me donuts and pigeons on a fairly regular basis -- and to be able to show them how I train so they can make decisions for themselves about how to bring along their own dogs.  Incidentally, if you click on the picture, you may notice the new spiffy stainless stakes anchoring my chains: these are from Mike Coleman at Heartland Dog Stakes and all I can say is that they're worth every penny.

In the last post I mentioned that I had seen a few potential hiccups and was working out some strategies to deal with them.  Martha Greenlee has posted a similarly-themed article on Steady with Style which is definitely worth checking out.  I experienced something similar with Bill back in 2010 in that first month I was able to spend out in Arizona (before the White Mountains went up in flames).  But the points are several:

• The dog determines the speed of the training, not the competition schedule, not the friend or the pro bragging about breaking a dog in 6 weeks;
• Keep it simple, stupid;
• Establish a solid foundation: this can be tough if you're working largely by yourself because working one dog behind another can provide both a great canine model for the dog you have, the distance that hopefully prevents the dog behind associating the pressure they will experience with the bird, but the reward of seeing a bird in flight;
• When you or the dog do make mistake, the solid foundation gives you something to come back to restart;
• Stick to the plan, a mistake doesn't mean the plan is flawed -- merely that you now have an opportunity to reflect on why things didn't go to plan.  Were you asking the dog to be perfect in less than ideal conditions? is it late in the morning and getting hot? is the air still and scenting conditions are lousy? is the air thick and humid such that even normally good flying birds just don't want to get up until absolutely pressed to?
• Assuming your execution of the plan was perfect, a dog's mistake can be a great learning opportunity for the dog because a dog that is otherwise perfect only knows what's right, it doesn't know what's wrong -- and as such only has half the picture.

To give you an example, working behind this spring, Jake made few, if any mistakes and I wasn't even entirely sure that he was registering the e-collar cue to stop when overlayed with the pinch collar.  I wrote about this in my next-to-last post and the remarkable silver lining experience we had despite having forgotten a key piece of training equipment.  As I mentioned last time, though, as he realized that birdwork was going to be part of his regular day-to-day experience, his intensity and drive went through the roof -- and where heat, humidity, and far-from-explosive birds hadn't driven him mental before, up here in Maine he blew through the e-collar on at least two occasions faster than I could turn the dial as he broke on the flush and went for the bird.  Again, mistakes help frame situations for both the dog and the handler.  A week or so later after getting a nice solid rhythm of reliable stands, I decided to enlist a friend to shoot a bird for him.  I popped the bird in the launcher and it flopped in the still air -- and instead of saying to heck with it, I picked it up and threw it.  My gunner shot and missed and Jake was off to the races, ignoring the e-collar cue to stop.  I wanted so hard to end on a positive note but could feel myself getting knotted up in my own confusion and decided to stop.

As I sat down with a sandwich, I recognized several things.  While I don't want to waste valuable resources like pigeons, I had chosen a poor flier as the sacrificial bird.  After being sure he wasn't sensitive to the gun (and in awareness of the various articles in The American Field about human and canine hearing loss), I have deliberately not fired a lot of rounds off around him.  When he was working behind and a bird was shot for the dog in front, I would ask him to stand while the dead bird was waggled and thrown ahead of him, and then send him to go grab it.  And while he might still be a pig-headed demon dog, I realized that I had put him in a situation where there were several cues that might have encouraged him to break -- a shotgun being fired, a crappy bird he knew he could catch, and a thrown bird to boot.  I took him back out in the evening once it had cooled and a light breeze had gotten up with two uncarded birds in launchers with the intent just to work on stopping-to-flush, something he knew and could do well.  Despite deliberately coming from mostly upwind, the breeze fishtailed and he caught of scent, began to style, and as he took a couple of steps, I popped the bird.  As it turned out, he turned his head as I did it, missed the initial flush, then saw the bird flapping and stopped himself.  It turned out to be a not-to-great bird and I was admittedly nervous.  He took a half-step, got a correction, stopped, and I walked out in front of him and fired the pistol.  As soon as he got scent on the second bird, he stopped and styled up.  I walked out in front, kicked around, popped the bird, fired the gun, and all was good.

As can be seen from this picture, if there is one thing about this dog that stuns me, it is that when scenting conditions are good, he will point a pigeon at 25+yards out.  This picture is actually from this morning -- two or three sessions since I started writing this post -- but part of why I think he is doing so well now is because I eliminated those various points of potential confusion for him.  I'll restate them, not to preach but to hopefully help other folks understand how they might not be clearly communicating to their dog and how they might unpack other training issues:

•  Weak birds can be useful for less-experienced dogs whose fire and drive you really want to stoke by letting the dog break or chase up and catch a bird;
• Weak birds are not useful for dogs who are in that intermediate stage before being fully broke but whose drive is intense -- and so use the best birds you can find.  In an ideal world, your pigeons are strong-flying homers who don't need cards and your quail accustomed to a johnny-house and never touched by your hands;
• If you've helped a dog understand the concept of standing still by throwing a dead bird for them during the introductory phases of this method, then make a decision about how far they are in their development and then never throw a bird for them again;
• If the only time you bring out a shotgun is to shoot a bird (which they already understand they will be sent for), then keep the dog guessing by using a shotgun with a 209 insert or a primed, empty hull.

Talking to Lary Cox at Christies Saddlery last week, he reminded me of Buck Brannaman's introduction to Bill Dorrance's True Horsemanship Through Feel.  It's a great story for many reasons, not least of which because Buck concludes his interaction with Bill by saying "Considering I wasn't really listening to me, he could have said a number of things to me."  If you take time to consider your mistakes and ask for help, sometimes the solution is often exactly opposite of what you'd have thought.

In other related news: my johnny-house quail are now in fine form and so some of the dogs have graduated to them.  After all my trials and tribulations with Jozsi outlined in this blog over the years, watching him do so nicely this morning was a real treat.  He is another example of why, even after you've started down the wrong path, the first six points in this post hold true.

the way life ought to be

 One of the delays in posting these last couple of months was because plans for the summer and fall just kept changing.  I knew Bill Gibbons wasn't going to be having a summer camp this year, but was still hoping to get out West to ride the range and watch dogs run big.  But Plan A just couldn't materialize.  Just as I was getting a little concerned, a friend called me and asked if I'd like to train dogs on her place up in central Maine -- to which I immediately said 'yes.'  There is a nice symmetry to all of this, insomuch as this farm had previously belonged to Jozsi's breeder, Lisa DeForest, before she passed away.  Between the property and various pieces of Lisa's old equipment, it's reassuring to me that she is in some ways still right here.

As much as I wanted the romance of riding the grasslands of eastern Montana, the reality was that I really needed to spend time getting Jake broke -- not because he was being a real problem child, just that it was obvious that it was repetitions that would make the six months of gentle lessons to date sink in and become his natural approach to birdwork.  And now, after three weeks of steady work, I realize that this is the advantage that pros have: we pay them to make time for our dogs.

I hauled my johnny-houses up to the farm and set them up in an old orchard patch -- and fortunately got a pigeon coop from Wendy at Widdershins for the pigeons.  The farm itself is roughly 60acres, with roughly 50 of them in two hay fields -- which had been given their first cut probably a couple of weeks before I got there so the grass was about 6" tall.  I also managed to figure out who owned the 180acre field on the north side and got permission to use that to exercise the beasts.  Very excitingly, too, I quickly discovered that the woods to the west also held significant numbers of woodcock and also some grouse -- which is less important for Jake, but a great diversion for Momo who would otherwise be watching everyone else do their thing.  With the main farmhouse gutted to studs on the inside, I am living in a camper trailer -- but am blessed to have access to both electricity and a well.  While they can take a crate siesta in the house in the afternoons, the dogs -- Momo, Jozsi, Jake, Capo, and Rye -- all sleep in the Luxury Cruiser at night.  The picture shows the Luxury Cruiser besides the old barn dated 1875 above the main doorway.

Readers will be familiar with the first three names and may remember that Capo is the bitch we co-own and who I took to Arizona last summer to get broke; Rye belongs to Wendy at Widdershins and is along for the ride to see if we can let her be a bird dog at her own pace.  (This is just to say that she came back to Wendy after pretty obviously being forced into birdwork without every really being allowed to have fun with it first.)  I am also lucky to be near several friends with bird dogs of their own that have been looking forward to getting in some regular work before the fall season -- and so while there is always some work involved getting everyone in synch with the plan for the day, it's nice to have enthusiastic company.

I spent the first three weeks doing pigeon work with Jake, Capo, and Rye -- seeing where each of them was and figuring out the best strategies to use with the resources I have.  Incidentally, while I brought homing pigeons from New York, I have discovered that they are used to being handled and as such much less likely to spontaneously flush.  I also haven't had them long enough to expect them to return to the coop with any kind of regularity.  As I know to be the case with chukar and pheasant, weather conditions also greatly affect their desire to get up in front of a dog -- and with unseasonably high temperatures and humidity, by the time we even get to mid-morning on certain days, they can be very reluctant to take wing whether they are wearing cards or not.   And so unlike the hot, very dry, and largely barren spaces of Arizona, I feel obliged to use launchers most of the time (which also protect the birds' feathers from any remaining heavy dew in the fields) to provide each dog with the most dynamic bird experience.  Happily, Rob and Kacey (who own Capo's sister, Moxie) are able to trap wild pigeons with some regularity -- and they are imminently more spooky and require a lot more carding to prevent from flying into the next county.

As can be seen in the first picture at the top, Capo seems as though she never left bird camp, even though she hasn't really seen or smelled a bird in easily six months -- and if a pigeon someone eludes the designated 'pigeon spotter' in the crowd, I will use her to do clean-up duty to locate the bird in question.  In my favor, Rye is certainly not afraid of pigeons and learned quickly she could probably catch them -- and so I have been building on those sparks to encourage her to seek out and now establish point on her pigeons, for which she then gets to play retrieve with the pigeon with the broken wing; I have just started asking her to hunt multiple birds and to introduce the pop-gun.  As can be seen in the second picture, she is really beginning to look like the bird dog she wants to be.  Jake is a demon: while I avoid working every dog every day, he has come to realise that he will be getting to do birdwork a lot and his drive has gone through the roof and, as a result, his e-collar 'number' to cue him to stop when he makes a mistake has also leaped multi-fold.   After three weeks here, he is almost perfect on being steady-to-shot and, as can be seen in the picture, his style remains solid; if you click on the picture to make it larger you'll see the carded pigeon sailing off.  And if I remember (and it coincides with going to the public library for internet service), I'll post some of the particular problems I've seen with my crew and (hopefully) post some of the solutions.

Momo is enjoying getting intermittent trips into the woods to look for grouse and woodcock -- and I feel blessed to have reliable bird contacts for him right over the wall.  I have certainly never found such a consistent cover as this one before and am careful not to go in there every day to avoid pressuring the birds too much.  For now Jozsi has been getting lots of exercise, but will be very excited to get back to come and work johnny-house quail and some more woodcock.  I had to take him out of the woods about ten days ago because while the experience of wild birds is as instructive for him as it is for Momo, his enthusiastic bull-in-a-china-shop approach was scraping his face up something fierce.  And for at least one weekend this summer I needed him not to have any actively open wounds because... I handled him in our first dog show.  Since Lisa's passing, and out of gratitude for the dog have from her, I've felt a need to try and keep her name alive for at least a little longer.  For the last two summers, I've been unable to attend the VCCNE Specialty show up in Keene, NH, and so, as one friend put it, I entered him in the conformation equivalent of Amateur Walking Puppy, the 'Field Trial Dog' stake.  I had a pretty good idea there wouldn't be a lot of competition either -- and so while the judge could have hated him or he could have uncharacteristically savaged her, he won his stake of one and now has a genuine non-regular First Place conformation ribbon.

As another friend pointed out, with a number of folks there knowing it was his and my first show, and in a stake of one, the jeering cheering started as we went around, Jozsi suddenly understood the attention was on him and perked right up, the judge started laughing and as a result a lot more people paid attention to one of Lisa's dogs than they ever would if I'd just had him in one of the Open stakes.  With Capo taking 'Field Trial Bitch' and her mother, Lucy, taking 'Hunting Dog Bitch,' not only was it a good day for Widdershins and Skypoint dogs, but as another show friend pointed out, it was actually refreshing to have a full Specialty -- with dogs representing all the offered classes.  If pictures materialize, I will post them for giggles.

Right now, I am wrapping up a final day of work covering other people's vacations -- and can hardly wait to get back up to Maine tomorrow to keep working all these great dogs.

silver linings

As the title and delay in posting would suggest, it has been six weeks of frustration waiting for some kind of clear plan or purpose for the remainder of the summer and fall to develop.  Here in New York, all the moisture that you might have presumed to have appeared in January and February and coated the ground in ice and snow waited till May and June.  And so we've had to try and slot things in between thunder storms and increasingly tall covers on our training grounds.

We did manage to fit in another group training day at TMT in the third week of May with Jack, Juli, Scotch, Dustin, Lyric, Gabi, Paige, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  It was nice to see friends again -- and we were blessed with good weather although a little more breeze would have made it perfect.  But we got everyone run and everyone had fun.  The top picture is of Scotch on just his second set of birds -- as I said to Josh, he's still very young and the fire needs stoking but when he gets scent, he knows what to do.  Look at the tail on that dog!  Fabulous.  For young dogs, I prefer to use birds that are fully awake and placed in spots that require the dog to use its nose.  For younger dogs with less prey drive, I think there's a lot of merit in a handler 'taking the dog for a walk' close to a planted bird -- in part because the young dog associates going with his handler with the excitement of finding birds.  And as the dog associates going for that particular kind of walk, that will also build drive as well as reinforce the desire to work with his handler.

After a great winter starting the breaking process with Jake, we lost our rhythm due to crappy weather coinciding with my days off.  He has been at the point of making the transition from the pinch collar to the e-collar for correcting him when he makes a mistake (ie. fails to stop or needs to be re-cued to stop) for some time -- and my challenge has been that he was simply not making very many mistakes.  Jake seems to have internalized all the external cues for stopping -- pointing, stopping to flush, and honoring -- and was standing very nicely through each of those things while either someone else flushed for him or the dog he was working behind.  In short, he wasn't doing anything to merit being re-cued to stop and stand still.

As I wrote two summers ago about knowing when to stop and when to keep going, my dilemma has been whether to assume he does know it and potentially create a problem by going too fast or to potentially lose style by boring the dog with lessons he knows he knows.  One nice part about the West method is that you're essentially teaching the dog the same skill in a variety of scenarios -- which is to say, you don't break the dog pointing birds, then teach the honor, or the stop-to-flush -- and so in that sense, you can mix things up with the dog by asking him to the same thing, albeit in a different (and hopefully interesting) set of circumstances.  Maurice Lindley had suggested that I use the stop-to-flush as the means to test whether he'd internalized the e-collar cue to stop -- in part because I could do it by myself using a launcher while still keeping myself in a position to correct him with the pinch if the e-collar didn't register.  The challenge remained that he would stop himself properly and then, very often, make little or no effort to move after the bird.  Nevertheless, the advice was sound.  What I've also seen with him is that he seems most reliable on birds he's not pointing, whereas having scent drives him that little bit crazier even if I'm standing by him with the pinch collar and someone else is flushing for me.

Today's silver lining was that I got up to TMT to feed my birds and hopefully get some training in on pigeons with Jake and discovered that, of the five checkcords that I can think of that I own, I didn't have a single one with me -- and certainly not the one with the pinch-collar on it.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.  So I cursed.  I had been tidying up all the stuff in the back of the truck and in the trailer and had just plain forgotten to make sure I had one or the other in the truck again.  I had already put out one pigeon in a launcher and two on cards but debated what to do.  The short answer is that part of me wishes I'd brought a camera with me to get some nice pictures of me in front of a high and tight Jake, but then again anyone who reads this blog would have laughed their butt off if they'd seen his regular purple nylon leash hanging off his collar.  He handled his stop-to-flush perfectly, broke on the first pointed pigeon after I'd flushed but I managed to stop him with the e-collar to style him up and reflush the bird, and he handled the final pointed bird really nicely.  And this is one reason I have been frustrated by our intermittent training schedule -- because he handles corrections really nicely -- and wish we could have gotten a bunch of nice even repetitions in.  This is largely what you pay a pro for: the time to establish a routine of (hopefully) productive behaviors.

But the real silver lining wasn't that Jake did well, but that forgetting a key piece of equipment that I would have otherwise used as a psychological crutch in the name of 'taking it slow and steady' forced me to take a chance.  Sometimes you need to have faith in yourself, in the training time you already have in, and of course in your dog.  This picture is actually from a couple of days ago, but he's a pretty happy chappy.

*******

In other news: Craig Doherty at Wild Apple Kennel has written a series of five blogposts on grouse trialing.  Whether you do grouse trials or not, there's a lot of really useful and interesting stuff for trialers in here.

And: I had a nice time judging SH/MH at the Nutmeg GSP Club hunt test a couple of weekends ago and was pleased to watch another set of really nice Spinones.   I realize I'm admitting to a stereotype-proven-wrong, but if there was a breed that has genuinely impressed me in the last year of judging hunt tests it has been these mostly white Spinones.  And not because they performed the skills well enough, but because they looked animated and excited to be doing it.

Also: if you ever send something back to Garmin to get fixed, remember to take out your memory cards or the after-market extended antenna.  I remembered the first but figured they'd just repair the busted screen on my Astro 220... no.  They sent me a whole, newly refurbished 220 back instead.  Fortunately, this is now my back-up unit and the 320 comes with an extended antenna in the box.

busier than heck

There's nothing like a good bird-dog addiction to keep you busy -- and April was another good example.  Mid-month, I hosted a training day for a bunch of friends -- including son-of-Sally, Jackson, and son-of-Jozsi, Judd, as well as Scotch, PJ, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  This picture is of Judd throwing a really nice point during what was only his second time working birds.  It was great to have a bunch of young dogs and watch them figure out what they had been bred for.

We then held our CVVC Spring field trial at the end of the month, for which I served as the chair.  It was my first time chairing a trial and thank heavens for a good group of folks behind me.  In an effort to minimize some of our costs, we elected to run it as a two-day trial and still managed to run 100+ dogs in the course of 48hrs.  On the one hand, it was a little frustrating not being able to accept all the entries received for our Amateur Walking Puppy stake, but on the other, it was truly exciting to see two large Puppy stakes with a bunch of first-time trialers trying their hand at the sport.  Hopefully everyone had a good time running their dogs even if it probably felt a little frustrating to be the last stake of the trial run in the later afternoon on Sunday.  Hopefully, they also came to understand two of the weird quantum physics phenomena of field trialing: on the one hand, even if you don't have many dogs to run, the trial will fill the entire time allotted; on the other hand, even if you do have a ton of dogs to run, your brace won't come soon enough.

After an exhausting weekend of seeding courses, filling bird bags, and marshaling volunteers (all of whom I greatly appreciate), it was especially rewarding to read the placements for that 14-dog Amateur Walking Puppy stake and to hand over the blue ribbon to my friend, Kim Barry, and her exciting puppy, Zoom, who is out of Kyler and Rene Blakemore's very handsome Dual Champion, Remington.  As you can see in the above picture, our club has a special trophy for the highest placed Vizsla in our Amateur Walking Puppy stakes in memory of a much beloved, much missed club member, Saul Himmelfarb.  The Open Limited Gun Dog stake also has a rotating trophy in memory of another lost-too-soon club member, Patrick Cooke, the owner of the great Yogurt.  Yogurt is an aunt to our Jozsi through her mother, Shaker, and so it feels especially rewarding to announce that Jozsi won the OLGD stake for 2 retrieving points towards his FC.  A big thank-you to Dave Margolin for taking the picture of his successful retrieve.  After a lovely long cast, he had a stop-to-flush, then quite literally a limb find -- a bird 4ft up on a branch -- which he handled beautifully and then hunted and searched like a madman for the remainder of his brace.

What follows is not to brag about me or my dog (in part because it's based on a compilation of several observations) but to hopefully encourage folks to think about what they're doing when they're trialing.

• Your dog needs to point a bird to place, but one spectacular find might trump a half-dozen ugly finds;
• If your dog finds a gazillion birds, then it simply doesn't have time in a 30minute stake to really demonstrate speed, range, and/or confidence;
• As a handler, you're putting on a show for the judges -- and whether you are or not, try to make it look like you and your dog are working as a team;
• If your dog has faults, then don't give it the opportunity to demonstrate them by trying to show its strengths instead;
• At some point, you will probably have to make a tactical decision about what is better for your dog's performance: if my dog has already had positive finds, does it make more sense to take an unproductive at the end of a stake rather than try to flush one more bird that might run or fail to fly or flush back into your dog's face?
• AKC weekend stakes might only be 30minutes long, but everything else being equal the dog that finishes looking like it's just warming up should place higher than the dog that looks like it's happy to be done.

This past weekend I was out in central PA at the GSPCA National Amateur Gun Dog Championship held at Warrior's Mark Wingshooting Lodge -- I think largely because I can ride a horse and am a fairly good shot.  For the first 30min series of the championship, every dog with birdwork had to demonstrate a successful retrieve -- with the first chukar encountered shot-on-course where possible.  Maybe because it was an amateur event, maybe because it was a single-breed championship, but the atmosphere was very supportive and encouraging.  For me, despite the slight pressure to shoot birds absolutely dead, it was a great opportunity to meet a bunch of new folks and to see a bunch of very nice dogs.  It was an honor to shoot birds for all the dogs and especially those that made it through to the second series (which was a 45min brace with all the birds being pop-gunned).  And while congratulations go to all the dogs that placed, it was very nice to see that Greg Nicholson and Greta took a 4th place and that our dear friends, Jen & Dennis Hazel, won the 2012 GSPCA NAGDC with their fabulous little dog, Raven.

May will hopefully be fairly quiet -- although I have just committed to hosting another training day.  June will be busy with three judging assignments on back-to-back weekends, two field trials and one hunt test.  In between all of that, hopefully we can keep working on breaking Jake and keeping Jozsi on track to finish up his title sometime soon.