two months in

Two months into camp and things have definitely taken shape.  Since the last post, we went through about a two-week period of 90+degs and high humidity that made things pretty wretched, necessitating early mornings and a seven day week to get everything done without having to really try and cram everything.  Since then the weather has begun to change and with it, the birds have started to move around too.  Some of our covers have gone barren, in others the balance of birds has changed -- and so we're seeing more sharptails than pheasants -- but in the cooler, but stormier weather of the fall, it seems like we're having more hit-or-miss days as the birds stay hidden in the sunflower and corn crop fields (which are still up) till they feel comfortable leaving.

A good illustration might be the story of the last two days.  Sharptail season opened on the 19th, but I finally got my license to start yesterday.  I took 5 dogs to a piece of private land we lease access to and which we normally run dogs off horseback on.  We've been over most of it and have a pretty good idea where the likeliest bird locations are.  It was sunny, but blustery.  And despite trying to get Momo, then Jozsi, then one of the camp dogs, into previously productive spots, we didn't even see a sharptail.  I then moved the truck a little ways and got Capo out.  She started trailing a covey about a 100yds out of the trailer, and we had a constant point, flush attempt, relocate cycle going for about a half-mile.  Whether these were the same birds I don't know, but I saw four birds fly into a spot about 200yds upwind from us.  We tried to sneak up a drainage unseen, but I saw them fly and relocate another 100yds further ahead.  (I don't think they could see or hear us, but the wind was just making them spooky.) As we came into the wind, Capo started pointing about 75yds across the wind from where I thought the birds were -- but was looking into the wind as at least two of the covey now flushed downwind from us.  I worked her through the area they'd left and decided it was time to head downwind back towards the truck.  In another draw, she stopped-to-flush -- and I'll admit firing two Hail Mary's just out of frustration.  She then stopped-to-flush again, but as I walked in another bird flew and I dropped it.  The same routine happened about 75yds further downwind.  I couldn't fault her terribly because I was taking her directly into a 10-20mph wind.  So when she managed to point a third, I was especially happy to take it for her.  I have no pictures of her from today, but astute, loyal readers will note that limiting out on our first day of sharptail hunting was done using my 135yr-old Stephen Grant hammer gun.  (The picture below is of Capo, but getting a pheasant poult pointed in a cut wheat field.)

Today, however, it was cold and blustery to the extent that I actually wore a jacket under my strap vest and thought I was going to get soaked for the first two hours.  I knew it was unlikely bearing in mind the cover and the wind direction, and sadly despite working hard, Jozsi drew a blank in the first field.  I then got Momo out in a spot that he and Jozsi had found two good sized sharptail coveys three days before.  To get there, you have to cross a cut wheat field.  Momo stopped to poop and a sharptail flushed wild about 10yds ahead of him.  We never saw another sharptail.  After working the initial cover thoroughly, I then took him across another cut wheat section towards a treeline.  It was a shame it wasn't pheasant season.  He pointed a large, mixed covey of hens and roosters right by the fencelines, three waves of 2-3 birds getting up.  He looked at me like I was a dumbass.  He ended his trip out with a nice solo rooster find towards the road, still a little annoyed that his father apparently didn't remember how to use either of the triggers on the shotgun.

Post-Script: since I started writing this post, I took Momo and Capo out into one of our local covers that afternoon once the weather had cleared out.  And over a point-and-back from the two of them, up went a covey of three sharpies, and in a miracle of miracles, I took a double.

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Jake the Snake has been doing well, too, finding both his range and his nose for both sharpies and pheasants.  Here's a nice picture of him with a rooster pinned in low, sage scrub.  With all the dogs, I've been surprised by the kinds of cover and how close some of these wild birds will hold in.  We've seen sharpies and pheasants share mid-summer alfalfa fields, sharpies in high weeds, and hen pheasants especially holding in tiny strips of cover left from mowing in hay fields. Earlier in the summer, we saw a fair number of hen pheasants decoying, trying to draw birds away from the clutch of poults.  All my dogs are trained to stop-to-the-flush -- and situations like that often mean that you when the dog performs the skill reliably they still get the reward of seeing other birds fly when you get in front of them.

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I have been breaking out two dogs, as well: my infamous Amy Winehouse, Rye, and a very nice dog belonging to my friend, Dick.  It's been neat to see them both respond to the West Method albeit coming to it from very different directions.  Rye is smart enough to know when she's being messed with or set up and will use your own pressure (or lack of it) against you when she feels like it -- and the challenges are often how to keep changing up the game to keep her slightly off-step and when to recognize her broken-pride-broken-wing routine as a bluff.  But she most definitely has the ability to make a nice broke gun-dog.  Ben is a great, young dog who has come to me with very few other hands on him, very few kinks, and a great attitude to do the right thing.  He is now at the point that, as can be seen in this picture, I am turning him loose in the bird field wearing a harness and dragging cables to slow him down.  This picture isn't the greatest of his overall style, in part because he is pointing a bird close up that we've already worked once and so hasn't been producing scent in that spot for a huge period of time.  But he is thoroughly used to the ecollar cue and so, as with his last workout, he inadvertently ran over a bird and it flushed ahead of him -- he knew he was supposed to stop, wanted to keep moving after it, but successfully rolled himself to the stop with the e-collar cue.  This is the sort of stuff that makes more of an impression to me about how the dog is learning.  They all know where the breaking field is and where the birds are likely to be, but after showing them the drills and contexts for stopping and staying stood still, I like to get away from launchers or releasers as soon as possible.

big wide open

We're now through with the first two full weeks of summer camp -- we've had our first round of scratches and scrapes and trips to the vet and what I am sure will be merely the first round of bitches in season driving all the boys completely nuts.  We have 20 dogs here in camp -- 17 vizslas, 2 pointers and 1 German Wirehair -- and after a busy first week, we now have proper kennel runs set up to accommodate all of them.  Ken has 14 dogs, I brought the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Capo, Rye, and the handsome Ben (who belongs to a friend of mine).  We had an uneventful trip out. happily, stopping over at our friends' house in western PA (Brian and Brandy own Dot, Jake's sister, who sadly is out at summer camp of her own), then a great visit with Meg's father, Bill, and his brother, John, at the Riordan family compound in eastern WI, then a short day's drive to Red Wing, MN, to visit with the fabulous Janeen McMurtrie of SmartDogs fame, before hauling out to north-central South Dakota.  On the right, here's Momo, Jozsi, Capo, and Rye celebrating what it means to be a Hungarian hunting dog in America!

We've got a pretty good regular schedule set up that ensures that every dog gets roaded twice a week according to their output and goals (for example, Momo is primarily an 8-10mph dog whose primary function is to be an all-day hunting dog and he and Rye make a nice pairing), we work the walking dogs (ie. the ones who will primarily be hunting and hunt test dogs) twice a week on wild birds, and we work the horseback dogs twice a week on wild birds.  Dogs like Rye and Ben are also here to get broke and we work those dogs three times a week on pigeons and johnny-house quail.  Sunday is a day off for all, if possible, and we like it like that.

But my Road Crew came to South Dakota for big spaces and wild birds -- and we have both.  Unlike last summer, it rained often and till late and so we still have a lot of crops (like wheat, corn, and millet) in which reduces our available training spaces, but we have seen what looks like two clear clutches of young birds -- and we have seen Huns, sharptails, and pheasants.  And Ken has done a nice job securing leases from landowners to run dogs on their properties.  It is amusing to think that we have maybe only covered about half of one of the properties we ride on after now taking dogs there twice -- and that that property is about 6 or 7 times the size of the Flaherty Field Trial Area that we normally compete at.  This picture is actually of Capo, first time turned loose after eight months of no birdwork on a species she's never smelled before (a sharptail).  This is why we love her so much, looking so good it looks fake.

Jake already took a good gash across one of his front legs and a speargrass seed in one of his ears.  If we had been at home, I would probably have taken him to the vet to get a few stitches put in and I certainly debated whether to break out the stapler but after conversation with Wendy at Widdershins (who works at a vet practice we stopped by at several times last year while up in Ripley) I decided to go with air and frequent flushing and, now ten days later, Jake got run off horseback for only the second time since he got here.  With twice daily flushings using a syringe and saline solution and only a spray of liquid bandage to protect it, the wound has filled in in nicely.  Ten days ago after his run, though, he was shaking his head a little too insistently and carrying one of his ears a little low.  After a week of flushing with an ear cleaner, there was only minor improvement and so he was one of the dogs that went to try out the facilities at Oahe Veterinary Clinic in Mobridge in an attempt to locate whatever it was that was bothering him and to try and rule out the possibility of a nocardia infection.  Happily, he seems back to his usual goofy self.  And this picture is from this morning -- click on the picture and you'll see him, standing tall for a sharptail about 15yards away.

Hopefully this will be the first post in a series, but bed is calling.  Have fun out there, everyone!

spring has sprung

It's hard to say that spring sprung because it seems like we've been through a bunch of schizo weather patterns which merited the air-conditioners being put back in and then fleece jackets and/or waterproofs.  I was just at Flaherty this past weekend judging for the Nutmeg GSP Club and between the hot, humid, still weather on Saturday (especially) and the jungle-like cover, I was glad I wasn't running any of my dogs.

Since the last entry, I did run the dogs and judge for the Long Island Pointing Dog Field Trial Club out at Sarnoff Preserve out in Riverhead, Long Island.  I like Sarnoff as a venue and would have loved to have hunted there back in the day when the LI pine barrens supported wild quail -- but it is a little too wooded on the edges and the course area a little too compact for me to run our Dancing Pirate, but I did run both the Mominator and Mr. Enthusiasm.  But it was a weekend of screw-ups: canine and human.

While the first mishap with Jozsi wasn't a screw-up as such, and it indicates the strengths and challenges of the venue, I told the judge that the decision I was making was going to be either brilliant or disastrous.  On the first major bend in the course, Jozsi headed into the piney cover dead ahead -- and as I got closer I heard him bark.  While not generally a trait we look for in pointing dogs, Jozsi has barked to me up in Maine when he knew he was potentially off course and has a grouse pinned.  I've gone to him in both instances and been able to shoot a grouse.  And so I ploughed into the woods hoping he had some kind of game bird pinned.  Maybe he did and maybe it left, but after probably only 5mins of wading around, I realized he wasn't there and I didn't know where he was and so, for the first time ever in a trial, asked for my Astro to locate my dog.  He was 600yds to the front.  But these are tactical decisions you need to make sometimes based on what you know about your dog -- and this time it was the wrong one.

I then ran Mominator -- and to illustrate the point in a different way, when he disappeared into the cover on the left at around 0:25 and didn't reappear, I told the judge he must be on-point in the thick stuff.  And he was.  I think he had four finds in that brace, competent and probably not the firmest dog in the world, and so imminently beatable.  But conditions were clearly tougher than I had expected and he was called back for the retrieve with just one other dog.  But, and here is where while it's fine to have high standards, don't sell your dog short.  He found the bird, I got it in the air nicely, it was shot cleanly, and when I turned to look at him, I could see he'd moved a couple of feet.  And being a dumbass, instead of waiting and demonstrating that he hadn't broken, I rushed to send him for an otherwise perfect retrieve.   I sold my dog out and we didn't get a ribbon.  I know we were the #2 dog and that all of this is fun for Momo -- but I sold him short and if he knew the depth of regret I have for doing that, I know he would still go get any and every bird and lick me anyways.  (As I write this blog entry I scanned over some previous posts and clearly I am a dummy: "Let the judge judge your dog"!)

I then ran Jozsi again, this time off a horse.  It was pretty hot, but he hunted like a beast.  He started with a genuine stop-to-flush, then had two finds off to the side in pretty good cover although his style wasn't great, and then around 0:26 decided he would step into the final bird and put it up.  He is now off birds and on the remedial plan.  He might have been hot, but he knew I was right there and hosed both of us.  My initial feeling is that we're going to go all the way back to some basic obedience and not let him actually work a bird until he's done a bunch of 'working behind' -- if nothing else, he needs to understand that I give him the opportunity to smell birds and watch them fly and not the other way round.

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I was glad to be judging, and not running, dogs this past weekend at the Nutmeg hunt test -- in particular because I knew I was going to get to see Ottla run in Senior Hunter.  And hunt she did. Despite the heat and humidity, she was clearly in physical and mental shape to deal with the craziness that is often the case in the forced environment of a hunt test brace -- and in this case, a bracemate who ran right across her and then stole point.  (Again, to revisit the topic of handler decisions: if you're being asked to bring your dog in for an honor, pick the open side, pick the uphill side, don't pick the downhill side where even if your dog could see over the knee-high grass, it probably won't have a good view of the other dog till the very last second.)  I tried to barely acknowledge her before her brace, but as you can tell she clearly remembered who I was at the end of things.  It was a real pleasure to be able to judge and qualify a dog I got to see as a pup on her first birds.  And so, all hail CH Broad Run's Ottilie of Red Oak SH CGC!

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Our friend, Jeremy, has been out a couple of times with us since he got his handsome GSP, Jackson, back from winter camp with Maurice Lindley.  Ever since we first saw Jack, we knew he was going to be a bold, stylish dog and his two weeks up in Maine this past summer reaffirmed to both of us that Jack was ready to take the relative stress of being broke.  And besides, with winters being what they are in the northeast, what could be better for a dog than a warm, working vacation in South Carolina?  But now that he is back, he and Jeremy need to find their rhythm together: Jeremy is finding his touch with both the e-collar and the checkcord and pinch-collar; Jackson is learning that the rules are the same with his owner as they were with Mo.  And for now, he's going to continue on the steady, incremental climb to earn the trust of being allowed to run free.  But, as this picture makes clear, he looks awfully nice even when he's 'merely' backing another dog.  But today was also a special day: Momo's eighth birthday!  I do wonder at just how far this goofy dog has taken us in the last eight years -- and wouldn't trade him or the experience for anything.

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Speaking of long journeys, it feels a little odd to have a plan all set ahead of time, but short of something disastrous happening I will joining up with Ken Kuivenhoven at his camp in SD for August and September and potentially not coming back till after VCA Nationals in Eureka, KS, in mid-October.  Ken and I had a chance to actually meet in person and chat at the NGDC in April and he's got a great set-up.  At this point, the Road Crew will be the Three Amigos plus Capo plus Rye.  If you're on the East Coast and would like to get your dog out on wild birds in big open spaces, I'd be happy to haul your dog.

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.

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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.

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.

where did spring go

As ever, it feels like I have to start a blog post with an apology, but sometimes writing really does have to take a second place to more important things like dog training, dog exercising, judging dogs, watching dogs, and trying to make plans to do more of the previously mentioned.

The beginning of March saw the League take a road trip down to Sumerduck, VA, for the Conestoga Vizsla Club spring trial -- and while none of them were actually entered, I made my debut as a field trial judge judging three of the juvenile stakes. In much the same fashion that I actually enjoyed my apprenticeship period as a judge, I also enjoyed the opportunity to share opinions with my fellow judges and learn some more about how they assessed the dogs in front of us. While I know that you will most likely only make one person happy with your decision, I'm finding the opportunity to look at so many dogs with a different kind of eye also makes me look at my own a little differently, too.

And in terms of perspective, I was also lucky to have lunch with someone with second-degree knowledge of several of the dominant field trial pointers of the pre-WW2 period. I wrote about it here at Living with Bird Dogs -- but it was neat to learn a little more about Mary Blue, Norias Roy, and their owner, Walter Teagle. While certainly from a subsequent generation, I was lucky to spend three days with Fred Rayl, son of Hall of Famer, Bill Rayl, at the Armstrong Umbel Endurance Classic way over in Guys Mills, PA. After the first day's running, sitting around a dinner table with various people, a discussion about pedigrees, breeding plans, and famous dogs inevitably occurred. Suffice to say, while one person was trying to tease out where the Rambling Rebel line had emerged and prospered, Fred asked him if he knew who owned Rambling Rebel's most famous daughter, Nell's Rambling on? The other person said "no," to which Fred replied, "My daddy." There was no ego or oneupmanship in the entire conversation -- and the answer brought plenty of laughter around the table. It should be noted that, in addition to her own election to the HOF, Nell whelped two other sons who have also been recognized to this same degree: Guard Rail and Addition's Go Boy.

Going back to the Armstrong Umbel to report the trial was a treat. The admiration I felt last year for the handlers, trainers, and owners was no less diminished, but I had a greater sense of what I should be looking for to capture for the official report for the Field. It was also nice to see many of the same folks I met for the first time last year again -- including Joe McCarl and Marc and Scott Forman. This year's trial was no less a game of faith than the previous year. If you go into the 'Galleries' section, you can see some of Chris Mathan's great pictures from the trial here at the Sportsman's Cabinet.

While it was sad to learn that his father, White Powder Pete, had passed away at the beginning of the month, it was great to see Jake's mother, Hard Driving Rita, run and lay down a powerhouse race for her two hours. I wish I could have met Pete in person and seen him run in more than National Championship DVDs -- but it was also really nice to see how much of Rita is in Jake, too. Jake had a family reunion of sorts, as well, with his brother, Hard Driving Mo (owned by Joe), and his sister, Hard Driving Dot. Dot is owned by my now friend, Brian, and is as much the firecracker as her brother; she actually went on won the 22-dog Venango Puppy Classic the weekend after the Armstrong. As you can see, these pictures came from Chris Mathan who co-bred the litter with Colvin Davis: Mo is the upper dog, Dottie the lower.

Since I started writing this post, I was also sad to see that Bert Wimmer, Pete's owner, had also passed away right around the same time. The Wimmers, both Bert and his father, Walter, were an integral part of the Indiana field trial scene for over a half-century. Here's hoping that owner and dog are reunited in a better place where the riding is easy and the quail plentiful.

In other news, I have also begun my spring hunt test judging assignments, this past weekend up at the Swift River Sportsman's Club for the Central New England Brittany Club weekend, judging SH/MH the first day and JH the second. I had the whole League with me in the Luxury Cruiser and was able to get in some nice training runs with all of them. Momo is... well, Momo... not quite enough ooomph or style to be a trial dog, but if you ever need birds to be found, he's the doggie! Jozsi is actually starting to act like he's a broke dog: his final find at Swift River in three-foot tall pines on top of a stone wall a piece of brilliance. I walked around him twice, trying to use the Astro to locate him, and then realized I should probably just kneel down and try to look under the evergreens to find his feet. And he stood the whole time when he had plenty of opportunity to be a jackwagon. He's even starting to honor of his own free will (!?). His tail issues haven't entirely disappeared, but I suspect that the more reps we get in where he does well and earns praise, the less frequent that little tick or wag will become as he realizes that if he stands there and lets me flush then he'll get both a) to see the bird fly and maybe even get to retrieve it, and b) he'll get love from his pop. Mark Coleman at Wingshot wrote a nice piece recently about his own experience with patience in dog-training -- and I hope Jozsi's increasing willingness to do what I want and to make it his own is the product of my patience with him. As for Jake, he's taking to the breaking process really nicely, again, I hope the product of the 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast' approach I learned from being out in AZ with Bill Gibbons. For those of you familiar with the West method, we're about at the point where we transition him to cues from the e-collar if he chooses to move after he's stopped himself. This picture is from our weekend at Swift River and, as you can see, he's showing tremendous restraint for a young dog sight-pointing a quail running in the open.

We have a big training day planned for this coming Sunday and hopefully we'll have a bunch of pictures of a motley crew.

missing in action

Apologies to the faithful followers of the Regal Vizsla for my absence. On the one hand, we've been busy and any time spent outside with birds and dogs is good time spent. Since I wrote last, we've been to a couple of trials, taken our annual trip to western Maine to chase rumpled grouse, and started to break Jake. All in all, a pretty busy schedule.

The first few days of November we went over to Flaherty to support the Mayflower GSP Club's first field trial in many years. Congratulations to all the folks there who contributed to making it a well-run, enjoyable event. Momo did his usual, not-quite enough horsepower performance and we both had fun; Jozsi ran in an uncharacteristically odd fashion, was honest but didn't look great on his birds, and took 3rd in ALGD; Jake suddenly decided he likes to run.

The transformation of this little pup from the excited little gun dog who ran at Conestoga to the horizon-seeking demon was remarkable. I was genuinely surprised. And very very happy. He showed his intensity, his application, and his handle and left me just remarking at how much he must have inherited from all the great dogs behind him. My plan for developing him has been pretty simple: establishing a handle on him, giving him just enough birdwork to see what his style looks like and to keep him hungry for birds, and to break him to the gun. I did enter him in a JH stake and I will say no more than he got hosed. But the intent had been to see if he would stick with me without singing him too much, to run him with a bracemate, and to reassure myself about his being broke to the gun. In that regard, he exceeded my expectations.

Know the rules: you may not be able to change a judge's mind, but you'll figure out quickly whether you'll run under him or her ever again. After the fourth invalid reason for his non-qualification, I realized the judge was either not looking at my dog or had forgotten the standard for Junior Hunter. I do believe there is merit in JH for any pointing dog, whether they are going to be trial dogs or hunting dogs -- and my plan had been to get Jake broke to the gun and then run him while he was wicked young just to get him fired up and used to running with a bracemate. From his first trial down at Conestoga to his JH run, he has shown no interest in his bracemates whatsoever. But with the summer getting all messed up due to the Wallow Fire, Jake's development was a little out-of-synch with the plan, and with the JH title really being a means to an end, his 'not-qualifying' run was disappointing and will probably be his only run at that title. In short, I got a pointer because I like their style and, frankly, I wanted to see what it would be like to try and raise a potentially all-age dog. And trying to handle a young dog into a small birdfield four more times for the sake of a introductory level title doesn't fit the plan in the long view.

*******

After the Mayflower trial we headed up to Widdershins to pick up Miss Capo and take her for a ride in the Luxury Cruiser. It was hard to imagine that it had been four years since we were there the last time when I went up to pick up Jozsi -- but it was great to see Chris & Wendy, to see all the renovations they've made to the farm, to get reacquainted with Munro (the ridiculously ripped cat), and to meet the goats, cows, and sheep. We headed over to our usual spot around Oquossoc and waited to meet up with our friend, John DeSantis, and his great young vizsla, Luna. Unlike all four previous years, the weather was in the 50s with bluebell skies -- no hint of snow or rain in the air -- and it proved to be a real challenge when it came to finding birds. Luna ran over a bird in our first cover which I shaved some feathers off, but which otherwise left unscathed. And then we hit a drought. We saw a few other birds, but I don't think either of us fired our guns in the next day and a half. I felt bad for John who could only stay 36hrs, but I guess this is why they call it hunting. The picture here is of Luna standing behind a couple of trees scarred up by fresh moose scrapings.

Nevertheless having five dogs to run, I left with a whole new-found appreciation for pro trainers like Joe McCarl who specialize in field-trial cover dogs. We were certainly able to pair some dogs: Momo, Luna, and Capo are pretty evenly matched; Jake & Jozsi seemed like it could work nicely, too. I wasn't smart enough to get data off my Astro to figure out what I actually walked, all I know is that I walked for four hours straight the first afternoon and then had two seven hours straight days after that. What I did discover was that pairing Jozsi and Jake was akin to dedicating profound faith in the battery life of the Astro and the ability of the whistle to penetrate grouse cover. Our little dancing pirate clearly enjoys a little competition -- and Jozsi was not up to the task. In the cover I shot 'Grousezilla' two years ago, John and I watched Jake tow Jozsi out past 500yds before Jozsi clearly realized he was further out than he felt comfortable. After another hundred yards, and realising he was about to crest a hill, I hurriedly chanked up the path and ultimately needed the e-collar to get his attention. I don't want to imply that Jake was blowing me off, I genuinely believe that he couldn't hear me in his excitement at that distance -- but again, with all the work I've put on him developing his handle, and getting him used to the e-collar, he knows my touch well enough to know the difference between being punished and being cued and showed up shortly thereafter cheesey grin on his face and happy to see me.

(Of course, as we all walked back to the truck, in much the same spot that I missed an easy bird two years ago, John and I were caught entirely off-guard by a grouse that had sat tight through two dogs running past it but which popped off as we walked by in conversation. We quickly christened this the 'FU Bird'. I resolved to come back for it the next day with Mominator and The Princess.)

John then left and I resolved to find more birds the next day. I took Momo out early by himself, carrying my precious Grant sidelever, hoping to find birds still on their night roosts and hoping to extend the life of this beautiful gun. We found nothing in the strip of cedars along the path, no trace of the bird Luna had flushed the day before, but as I rounded a corner where Dudley and I had both missed a bird over Momo four years before, there he was 25yds ahead pointing with a 90degree bend in the middle. I snuck toward him, cocked the hammers, and when nothing flushed, I relocated him. The bird must have left its roost shortly before Momo got there and kept moving as I came up because as we then headed off in a new direction, we heard the bird flush off to our left.

Jake had actually had a spectacular point on a grouse the day before, looking just marvelous all the way through the flush (which I can only credit to the genetic payload that he carries from his mother's side and especially his grandmother, 7xCH Hard Driving Bev). But I felt bad for Capo who had, so far, failed to have any bird contact. This picture is from our failed attempt to find a new cover, but it was a neat downed tree and a good place to take a quick break. Sadly, the closest she got was a nice honor on a stopped-to-flush Momo after we went back for the FU Bird. Jozsi redeemed the team the final day, too, stopping-to-flush on a grouse in what I call Momo's Rain Cover and then repointing it in a tree with wonderful intensity. We were past being terribly sporting at that point and one tossed branch later, the bird came down -- it's crop full of clover leaves like all the birds we've taken in November. The sad statistic was that in the indian summer weather we had a total of 9 birds moved in two-and-half-days.

*******

After a couple of judging assignments, the first weekend of December meant our Connecticut Valley Vizsla Club all-walking trial -- and the joys of bird-planting and hosting the raffle and trying to fit in running the dogs between all that. Although a little out of sequence, to summarize: Momo wasn't going to be a contender anyways, but got picked up early somewhat uncharitably; Jozsi acted like a complete ass and I didn't need to be told to pick him up; and Jake ran like a real champ. And won. All I can say is that we'd put the work in and he and I have figured out our timing so that I can let him make a good cast, anticipate a turn in the course, and then sing him around without having him necessarily lose ground. And so, with a win in both AWP and OP, he is done with Puppy stakes and the process of breaking him begins.

My plan is not to run him in Derby till I feel like he is virtually broke -- and then either till he has his Derby points or till he starts obviously misbehaving and acting on his own behalf (whichever comes first).

*******

Since we all came back from Arizona, I began working with Jake just using his regular leash and collar to get him used to the idea of a small tug as a cue to stop and stand still. (This is in addition to the more general, good citizenship kinds of routines where he isn't allowed to leave his crate or step through the front door until told and to stand to be wiped down when he comes in from a run in the woods.) We have since transitioned to the checkcord and pinch collar as part of his regular yardwork -- and also to the whistle as a cue to stop-and-stand-still. For us, the whistle cue to stop is an important one in our life here in the Bronx where we never know when we might need to stop and/or corral the dogs when we encounter a deer/a paintballer/a drunk/a park ranger/someone looking for random stranger sex. In any case, we've also begun to overlay the e-collar over both the whistle and the pinch collar in preparation for his actual birdwork.

And that began this past Wednesday. We were lucky to have both Jeremy + Jackson and John + Juli + Dustin. While Jackson and Dustin are still puppies, Juli is a MH qualified dog and a great candidate for Jake to learn what 'working behind' means. He's already shown some fairly natural inclination to stop-to-flush (which he actually displayed earlier that morning on an exultation of mourning doves) and to honor (which he did rather humorously on a birdhouse in his first trial down at Conestoga). But now it becomes about combining natural inclination and structure. And he did a great job -- and while this is a wide-angle lens, he has already figured out the cues for either a situational back (on the humans) or an actual honor (on Juli) even at some distance. Exciting stuff, for sure.

work finally paying off?

Since I owned up to not being the calmest dog trainer on the planet, a whole lot has gone on. First of all, Her Majesty, Widdershins Skypoint Capo, came back from Arizona after Bill was kind enough to finishing breaking her for me. As with Jozsi's return last year, she flew direct from Phoenix to Newark through Continental's PetSafe program and arrived in fine shape. As one indicator of what kind of environments she was being kept in before, during, and after her flight, the waterbowl that Tamra had frozen for her was still three-quarters solid when I picked her up.

Once again, the headline you'll never read: "Healthy female vizsla arrives safely at Newark airport!"

With The Road Crew reunited, I immediately loaded them into the Luxury Cruiser and headed up to TMT to get in a morning's training before turning right around and heading south to the Conestoga Vizsla Club trial down in Clear Spring, MD. We met up with Jeremy and Jackson again and immediately began by running the little liver dog through his paces. As you can see in the picture, he is showing a great nose and some very nice style at 12wks of age. Once again, he got to make a retrieve with the birds not wanting to fly in what was a 90% humidity morning. His future is very promising.

Then we put down Her Majesty in an effort to remind her that even though places and faces had changed the rules had still applied. In this way, I feel spoiled. I know how Bill trains, I know how the dog was broke, and I know how to keep her honest and maintain the training so that at whatever point it will become second-nature to her. And as I've said to a bunch of folks in the last couple of weeks or so, the beauty of the West method as practiced by Bill Gibbons is that, even if she messes up, there's no hooting or hollering. I had said this to Jeremy before we went out, to think about how different what he saw the previous week and what he'd see with me working Capo would be. And he did. As should be expected, she tried to bust in on her first bird, got corrected, broke on the shot with her second bird, got corrected, and then stood like a million dollars through all the hoopla of trying to get two running birds into the humid air. Not a word was spoken. All we got to watch was a jacked-up 19mos old vizsla working birds.

With the West method what I've come to realize is that in the absence of any handler theatrics, even if the dog is imperfect, all the focus remains on the dog. Whether you're a hunt test judge or a field trial judge, or simply a guy watching someone else's dog hunt, your eyes never come off the dog standing, you're never distracted by a handler pleading, cajoling, or bullying their dog. Jozsi ran next and while there was still a little tail ticking till I got to him, he stood his birds beautifully and honestly despite having plenty of opportunity to roll out of sight and commit a felony or two. Momo, too, did a nice job -- this great point in truth being a long, long sight point on a pair of birds walking together some 40yds away. Jeremy and I spoke about this, about dogs' color-blindness relative to humans (not that it really helped us last week as we walked right past the hen quail buried in the dead leaves and then noticed Jackson had stopped and was pointing it), but that their eyes have proportionally much higher percentage of of rods in their eyes and a much higher flicker rate, or refresh rate, giving them a much higher ability to detect even small degrees of motion in the world ahead of them.

Luisa or Janine: if I've somehow gotten this piece of canine physiology wrong, please correct me in the comments below.

We then hauled ourselves down to northern Maryland to the Indian Springs WMA. I hadn't been here before and was a tad concerned that it looked pretty compact for running trials at. Compact it is, especially for anything closely resembling a true All-Age stake, but there are enough fields and edges that each stake could be run on a slightly different course -- and with Blair Lake on one side and a rising ridge of hardwoods clearly in the early process of turning, it was a beautiful spot. All the same, while some cutting and management had clearly taken place, it was clear that it had been a warm, wet spring and the cover was very high in places. And while the temperature cooled while we were there, scattered showers were largely interrupted by rain all weekend. It was a great weekend to have an abundance of long riding coats -- but despite the weather, the dogs all did well sleeping in the Luxury Cruiser and I was perfectly comfortable sleep in the back of the truck under the cap.

Jake did a nice job in Open Puppy, showing no signs of being at all unnerved by being handled from a horse for the first time nor any indication of interest in his bracemate -- both great for a 7mos old dog. As I've said previously, my initial want for Jake's development was to build a relationship and establish a handle and then encourage him to run far and wild. And while his range was moderate, he dug into cover when he felt the need, would pop out to the front at appropriate times, and handled like a charm. It was a very nice start that earned him compliments if not a ribbon in a fairly large puppy stake.

For her first trial, Capo also more than acquitted herself -- handling nicely even with a relative stranger. By the time we got to the backcourse, she had really started to open up, rolling out along the eastern woods line. She then disappeared and the judge and I both knew that she was standing someplace -- and then she reappeared and brought me a feathery present, directly and gently to hand. We had run out of course and so the judge alerted me that we could turn back -- at which point, she promptly nailed a point looking like the Million Dollar Baby. The judge gave me the option of collaring her and trying to flush the bird, but I elected to treat the whole situation as if she were a truly broke dog. She stood through the shot and then broke and retrieved her bird to hand. This earned her a 3rd place ribbon, a nice testament to a very promising dog.

While I would have loved her to have acted completely broke, she is still a mere 19mos old. And the best part about the whole situation is that I know exactly how to review the lessons she learned this summer and so we did so on Monday morning after the trial, again progressively improving from grabbing the bird, to breaking on the shot, to standing high and tight all the way through. While the picture above shows how nicely she'll self-stack, this is how she sets up on birds, too.

Open Gun Dog was the actually the first of the stakes the Road Crew ran in and it was raining softly throughout the stake. Jozsi ran in the very first brace and on a course that the judges were not entirely sure of to start with. I think having to make mid-course corrections actually worked in our favor because if there is one thing that I can rely on all my dogs for, it's to handle for and with me. His bracemate was picked up for an infraction around the 5min mark and that, too, probably worked in his favor -- or, at the very least, and in contrast to Momo, causing him no detriment. Jozsi doesn't need a bracemate to make him run hard and so we did our best to look like a well-synched team. Birdwork was at a premium for the entire stake and Jozsi established the precedent by not making bird contact till the 28min mark. There was a little tick in his tail as I rode up to him which disappeared by the time I dismounted. The bird went up, all was in order, I took him on, the brace ended shortly thereafter. On the Jozsi scale it was about a 7.5 out of 10, but truth be told it was also only his second, clean broke dog run. And I was pleased.

Momo went out in the fifth brace and was braced with another lower-powered dog. Both hunted nicely, but neither really got out there. With time coming on, I took Momo back to the same spot that Jozsi found his bird and he made contact, too. His bracemate honored him, all was in order, and the brace ended shortly thereafter. I was pleased with him -- and while I knew only a few dogs had made it round with birdwork to that point (and did all day, in fact), I doubted he'd end up with a ribbon.

But the highpoint of the day was hearing Jozsi's name mispronounced as the winner of the OGD stake at dinner that night. I have deliberately not run him a lot in the last two years because I don't need to try and show a dog that I am not proud of -- and while I would rather he fail gloriously than lay down the mundane, I also didn't need to keep paying entry fees just to watch him blow me off. But to have him take a four-point major towards his Field Championship after carrying the day from the first brace despite strong performances from some local favorites was a real treat. The bittersweet moment is that I no longer have the opportunity to call Lisa DeForest and tell her how proud I was. But I am grateful to the Semper Fi crew for letting me join their toast and remember her in the process.

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This past weekend we went to the Finger Lakes region of New York to celebrate our wedding anniversary and so that Meg could test herself one more time in a ridiculously long running race, the CanLake 50. The race features both a 50mile and a 50K race, the 50K folks joining the super-crazy around the 19mile mark. Unlike the previous 50K she did two years ago, the CanLake 50 is all on roads and follows a counter-clockwise route around Canandaigua Lake and compared to her previous race relatively flat (a mere 2200ft of ascent as compared to the approximately 5000ft she experienced the previous time). One side-effect of this was that Meg bested her previous 50km time by over 3hrs! As she'll say herself, she's not fast but she'll get there -- a great illustration of why the tortoise will beat the hare. At the end a number of folks commented on how well she looked during the race.

I pulled a hammy slightly doing a trail run with the League at the awesome Wesley Hill Nature Preserve in an attempt to get them exercised between meeting Meggers at the aid stations at 9.6miles and 23.7 miles. I love places that state that 'dogs under full control' are welcome, not 'dogs on leash' but dogs under control. A good argument could be made as to whether field trial dogs are actually under 'full' control, but I like the logic that says that a dog on a leash is not necessarily under full control either. In any case, the League ran there three days in a row -- and heaven knows, Jakey loves running in the hardwoods. And I am glad that I had an Astro and that he has a handle on him. Zoiks. He needed a whole day to recover from all his exercise once we got home. But here is a nice picture of him looking out on Honeoye Lake early one morning. I don't know if the Iroquois have a word for fog rising off water, but from living in Portland, OR, and kayaking on the Columbia, I remember that in Chinook the word is 'skamokawa'.

a couple more updates

After almost a week with us, both our regal vizslas have realized that the little, long-tailed terror is here to stay -- and in that realization have decided to welcome him into the pack. Jozsi, in particular, was a little intimidated by the whirling white fireball but, with reassurance and encouragement from us, has embraced his role as big brother. For all his little quirks, Momo has always had both a strong sense of self and control -- and as such, has given Jake appropriate feedback since Day 1. But three-dog group-play in our living room is quite the sight to see. We're still structuring their days pretty heavily with solid spells of crate time in part because while accidents in the crate have been non-existent and accidents in the house have been minimal, we are still hyper-vigilant about Jake's puppy ADD taking over in an instant as the need to relieve himself suddenly crops up in his juvenile consciousness. Here is the little prince with his new favorite pacifier! What a handsome chappy!

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Jake had never worn a collar till he came to us -- and now he wears one constantly. (You can see in the picture that while we had an old one of Jozsi's that would go tight enough, I had to make a zip-tie retaining loop so he couldn't chew it.) It struck me that this was something that he should get used to because his initial training cues will come through a collar, whether for yard work or field work. A friend told me that Delmar Smith had told him that when the pups were very little, he put tiny collars and cords on them, just long enough that if they didn't hold their heads up, they would trip themselves. In any case, we're working on having him wait to be told to come out of his crate, to stand and wait to be told to go through the front door, and to stay to the front when we're out walking off-leash. He's doing great. Jerry Kolter, incidentally, also starts his pups out young on a stake-out line also to acclimatize them to neck pressure -- preparing them for leash work. I also much prefer a stake-out chain to a minefield of individual stakes, and while I don't know if I'll have a legitimate chance to chain out our dogs before heading to Arizona, they will all spend a good chunk of each training day waiting their turn on the chain gang.

What I didn't mention about Jake was the primary reason we got this particular pointer at this particular time. After seeing some nice dogs at the 2009 Northeastern Open Shooting Dog Championship, seeing more at Bill's camp last summer (including Harold's beautiful bitch, Sage), I knew I wanted to own at least one pointer in my life. And unlike vizslas, there are no shortage of pointers -- which are arguably the Ford F-150s of the pointing dog world -- and so I wanted to wait for a special breeding. While Jake's mother, Hard Driving Rita, has yet to earn any major field trial wins, she contains the genetic code of two phenomenal grouse and woodcock dogs -- Joe McCarl's Hard Driving Bev and Frank Lanasa's Centrepiece -- who between them have accumulated at least 12 wild bird championships. I don't mind saying that I have been in love with Jake's daddy, White Powder Pete, since watching the 2008 National Bird Dog Championship DVD. And everything else I've learned about Pete, especially, tells me that he is something special -- an all-age dog who is also used as a quail plantation guiding dog, a pointer who would as happily as any vizsla sleep on your bed with you. Pete ran his seventh and final National Championship this past February shortly before his pups were born -- and William Smith, who scouted for Colvin Davis this time around, has written a nice tribute to Pete's trial career on Strideaway. (The pictures of Rita and Pete are both borrowed from Chris Mathan and The Sportsman's Cabinet.)

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In other news, my official report for the Armstrong-Umbel Endurance Classic appeared in the May 7th issue of the American Field and which has also recently appeared in full on the Strideaway site.

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And in a pleasant repeat, I heard the segment of NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" from September 25, 2010, and recorded on location in Oklahoma City that featured Delmar Smith as a celebrity guest. What a hoot that man is!