so much excitement...

So much has been going on in the last few days...

We went over to a friend of Meg's house in Queens on Saturday for a little BBQ with friends and family... and to celebrate their dog's 14th birthday! Happy Birthday, Pandora! Seeing as Pandora is a little advanced in age, Momo decided to get rambunctious with their neighbour's dog, Lucy... for pretty much the entire time. To be fair, Lucy was the prime instigator.

Then on Sunday afternoon, Momo and I went for a little roadtrip back up to our favorite gamebird farm in western MA. After a luxurious night at the Motel 6 in Brattleboro, we got there nice and early. What a nice day! Compared to the last time we were there when the temperature hardly changed all morning and the breeze was virtually non-existent, it warmed up a nice 15degsF while we were there, the humidity only dropped slightly, and the breeze was fairly constant. What a difference for Momo's sniffer. There was a lot more ground cover than the last time which helped to keep the chukar feel hidden so there was a lot less running on their part. While he still had his moments of clumsiness and bumped four birds, Momo threw some nice shapes to show me birds on the ground. All in all, we claimed seven birds, he bumped four, and I missed two.

One of the highlights wasn't the chukar he found, but the turkey(!) and more excitingly, the ruffed grouse hen and six poults. Now maybe they've been juicing up the grouse in the Connecticut River Valley, but that hen bird was huge compared to the midgets we've found in Sterling Forest in NY. Anyways, hopefully that's a good sign for coming years and that after several low years, the grouse population is on the rebound.

Momo was certainly tired -- and slept pretty much all the way home. Now we're going to watch the Academy Award-nominated Mongolian film Cave of the Yellow Dog.