what we did in school today...

Last weekend, we got invited to go up to Flaherty to join a group of friends who were running a 'mock horseback trial' training session. Heaven knows, any excuse to ride a decent horse and chase a decent dog is a good one for me.

Besides my two, the only other red dog was Stephanie's Rye -- all the rest were GSPs. I wanteed to give Momo the chance to get used to be running from a horse because I thought he'd enjoy it -- and he ended up braced with Baldur, my friend Kim's biiiig-running dog. In terms of run, Baldur has it in spades -- but the box score at the end of the day was the same: one divided find, one honor, and one find each. But I swear that Momo was running with a smile on his face. We need to do this again. He may never be a trial dog like his brother, but he is certainly enjoying himself.

Mr. Enthusiasm ended up braced with Jen + Dennis's Tucker. There aren't many dogs that I enjoy watching as much as my own crazy man, but Tucker is one of them. We were in for a footrace. The wind must have been fishtailing something fierce because none of the dogs I saw run ran quite the long, linear race that you might expect. But Leadbelly and Mr. Enthusiasm found birds. The first picture is of Jozsi high and tight on a running pair in The Pines. He had two more finds, including one on an obviously running bird that often provokes him into getting in after it. He looked great. This second picture is of Tucker -- he's a good looking boy with some nice manners for a young dog. (These pictures are courtesy of Jen, by the way.)

*******

Yesterday, we took the boys and the lovely Ottla up to do some more birdwork and get her used to being handled. I am grateful to Ottla's mom, Annabella, for taking these pictures -- and especially this one of me and The Mominator. As you can imagine, it's tricky trying to get pictures of yourself with your own dogs while they're actually working. In case folks are wondering, while I am wearing my blank pistol, I am carrying my shotgun. One of things I've realised -- and I might have gotten this suggestion from Don Brown at Dobrocat Vizslas -- is that Momo tends to creep a little when you get in front of him, and especially when you have a shotgun in your hands. Completely geeked to retrieve, he is anticipating the flush. And so I am carrying the shotgun and asked Ottla's dad, Mario, to carry my other one to simulate a shooting party. And we didn't shoot a single bird, merely blanked them with the shotgun. Between these kinds of drills and working him each morning with the pinch collar, I'm hoping we can get his feet a lot steadier by the end of the month.

But of course, the highlight was watching Ottla figure out how to be a bird-dog. We're using blue scaled quail (because it's what was available) whose initial tendency as primarily grassland quail is to run rather than fly. My own preference is also to use fully alert quail, rather than sleep them up so they're groggy and don't act like birds -- and so we've been putting her birds out in releasers in likely spots and turning her out. This week though, I offered to teach her to breakaway and to begin handling her -- with the goal of demonstrating how Mario and Annabella can handle her in the future -- and also to give her the clear cue that me and and her orange flash collar = birds = fun.

And after some modeling from The Mominator and Mr. Enthusiasm, she seemed to clearly understand that a certain whistle cue meant to get her running legs on and come with me. (In a side note, she almost ran over a woodcock which flushed as soon as she passed. It's nice to see the mudbats back in the neighborhood even if they're just passing.) She had worked one sorghum strip looking for a bird we had slept slightly (but which had moved on), clearly find the spot it had been placed and filling her nostrils. Then she cut ahead and through the cut in the hedgerow and locked up on the bird hidden in the sorghum on the far, downwind side. She held nicely till I got to within about three feet, then stalked a step, pointed, stalked, and then leapt in for the bird which got up and flew nicely and was pursued by a happy vizsla.

Having just done some research, she and my two boys are remotely related having several common great-grandparents. But it is also clear that she looks like her momma, Blaze, especially here on point. It's great to see a young dog begin to drawn down on her genetic coding and pick up on the game.

the next generation

Phew wheee! Never got round to writing the second part of our Ukraine travelogue... the part with the mummified monk fingers, belly dancers, and trying not to spontaneously burst into flames for being a heathen. Sorry. You'll just have to extrapolate.

Other folks have been writing some nice things that led me to ponder how on earth I ended up with a pick-up truck full of dogs, guns, and training supplies -- a truck I don't commute in, but somehow still end up putting 12,000miles on a year. This is a small figure to some, but this is the northeast. And so while this post is titled for the folks that get us started in this funny bird-dog game, it should probably be dedicated to my wife who indulges me in my odd obsession (and keeps our dogs fit).

The National Championship for Field-Trialing Bird Dogs is finally over despite (and I quote Brad Harter's official synopsis) several days of "brutal conditions." And the winner is Carl Bowman's In the Shadow ('Buster'). The New York Times ran a nice story on the Championships which concluded with this absolutely fabulous quote: “I told the old gentleman who started me in this sport 40 years ago that it probably would have been better to give me a gram of cocaine because then I could have done my time in prison,” said Larry Garner, an amateur bird dog field trialer from Dallas. “I could have gone through rehab and become a productive citizen again instead of being addicted to bird dogs and chasing them all over the United States and Canada.” Amen.

As for my own perverse addiction, I'd like to thank Stephanie Gutierrez for awarding Jozsi his first blue ribbon -- and have already been informed that she has no intention of running her new pup in any field trials. So not fair. But I think I will have my revenge before the end of the month: while Steph will get to judge The Mominator once more, I will get to judge her and the lovely Rye at the same hunt test! I should also say that amongst many others, Joan Heimbach has been my particular fairy godmother of field trialing. Thank you.

And while she is primarily talking about horsemanship, Gin at High Mountain Horse has a great post asking those of us in the current generation to 'pass it on' to the next. I couldn't agree more. -- and as you'll read, I'm trying to do my part. Holly at NorCal Cazadora asks another poignant question about the dangers of assuming that those of us who enjoy hunting and fishing (and I would suggest even the not-necessarily-lethal kinds of sporting dog events) will be able to do so in perpetuity. Personally, I hate the idea of legislating to protect the future -- but when faced by the slick, but frankly disingenuous, campaigns of folks like the HSUS, perhaps we need to. As Mike Spies at Living with Birddogs notes, there is a new force in the blogosphere dedicated to tracking these jackasses.

I, on the other hand, have become hairy godfather to a couple of new puppies from our friend, Michelle's most recent litter. How two dogs from Virginia end up in New York City seems a little strange, but they have. We haven't had a chance to get Murphy on birds yet, although that moment will hopefully be soon. But The Mominator and Mr. Enthusiasm did get to meet Ottla today -- and she got to rendezvous with some quail.

Even with first birds, I prefer to have the dog use its nose to find a bird -- rather than merely deposit a bird in front of it in clear view -- and so we dispersed a handful of birds in a feedstrip to see how she managed. The first couple of birds literally either ran away from her (because she was still in potter mode, wondering what was different about this particular walk) or flushed behind her -- and while she never saw them go, she buried her nose intently in the hotspots they'd left clearly trying to make sense of this new, strangely exciting smell. And then launched into a different gear.

As you might imagine, even with a small bird like a quail, having it launch in your face can be a little daunting -- and so with her next three flushes she sank onto her back legs a little as the bird took off before heading off after it to much praise from the gallery. Besides the focus in her face in chasing the quail in flight, the best part of the picture at the top comes from the understanding that she has watched the bird flush, then land, and then start running through the brambles. In at least two cases, she headed off after the bird, performed a several-yard serpentine ground track and then boosted the bird into the air.

We had initially run the three dogs together before any birdwork -- and put Jozsi in his hauling rig and cables to really wear him out and work on his conditioning. I should mention that at one point Ottla saw Momo standing ahead of her and immediately stopped and didn't start moving till he did. She didn't know he wasn't pointing, but a natural honor is a lovely thing to see.

Then once Ottla was done with her first five birds and had scattered them to the wind, I put down each of my two. The Mominator had a nice run of his own posting three genuinely impressive finds on quail running in deep cover -- and with nice steady feet; Jozsi had four finds of his own, impressive bar the second where he decided to chase a running bird in the open. I realise this is one of Momo's weaknesses, too, so I will need to start proofing for that over the next couple of weeks as well.

Stay posted.

Not just for chicken...

Continuing our tradition of spending Valentine’s Day in a post-Soviet country, Meg and I decided to take a week’s vacation in the Ukraine. As with our recent trips to Mongolia, we are lucky to have family members to visit – this time, Meg’s brother, John. But unlike Mongolia, and while John does speak Russian fluently, my wife also has a working knowledge of the language giving us a little more independence.

We’re also lucky that Kiev appears to be a pretty walkable city, even in the winter, even when clearing the sidewalks seems to be an afterthought. And so we’ve been able to take several good walks to take in some of the sights near John’s apartment. (This first picture is looking from the belltower of Saint Sophia down to Saint Michael's.)

Despite the German bombardment and bloody occupation of the city during WW2, itself sandwiched between a Soviet architectural style never known for its grace, downtown Kiev seems surprisingly pretty. There are certainly points of the city that seem to be in the state of practiced dilapidation that we’ve seen in Mongolia and Kazakhstan – and a similar number of tall, construction cranes on the skyline. However, unlike either of those places, a fair number of these cranes are actually working.

The downtown architecture does have a continental feeling to it – in no small part because a fair amount of the downtown buildings were built by Italian architects. The Cathedral of St. Andrew, for example, seen here was designed and built in an Italian Baroque architectural style by Bartolomeo Rastrelli.

Underneath all of this, literally, lies a much older city. The Cathedral of Saint Andrew, for example, is located on the spot that the Apostle Andrew legendarily predicted as the site for a great Christian city. As soon as you step inside the Saint Sophia Cathedral, you realize that in addition to the various layers of 18th, 19th, and 20thC restoration there are also still sections of 11thC stucco work. Saint Sophia is unusual (like the Gandan monastery in Ulan Bataar) in that in it was preserved during the Soviet era as a museum – left perhaps ostensibly as a monument to pre-communist degeneracy, but sentimentally I imagine because even the most cynical Party member couldn’t quite bring himself to level the incredible beauty of a sanctuary like Saint Sophia.

Where Saint Sophia is a museum, the remainder of the churches we’ve visited are all active as places of devotion. Like Saint Sofia, Saint Michael’s is an entire monastic complex with monks’ cells and a secondary chapel (dedicated to St. John and which seems primitive by contrast with its wooden shingled dome); Saint Andrew and Saint Vladimir are ‘merely’ stand-alone churches. And just incredibly gorgeous.

There is some speculation that the reason the Kievan Rus converted to the Eastern Orthodox church was because of Prince Vladmir's evoys' visit to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul in the 10thC and their proclamation that "we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it." Saint Vladimir is the only church we’ve been to that permits photography (albeit for a small fee) and, while I have always been fascinated by Orthodox icons. (I should ask my parents whether we visited Kykkos or another monastery when I was a boy, but I do remember being drawn to the religious painting there.) But, and as Sharon Gerstel noted in an exhibition catalog review, to only see these icons out of context on a gallery wall is to miss a huge amount: "Within a church, the icons would have evoked a different response. There, flickering candles or lamps enliven the holy faces, and the wooden panels on which they are rendered emit the pungent smell of incense. Within the darkened church the figures, set on a gold background, appear to wrench free from the strict confines of their wooden backing." Hopefully these pictures convey some of the glimmering majesty of these places.

On a technical note, all these pictures were taken on our new point-and-shoot. We really liked our old Panasonic Lumix (which simply wore out) and decided to go with another, this time the DMC-FX580. I mention this only because I'm still experimenting with some of the shooting modes (of which there are many). The first interior picture, for example, was taken in a mode called 'Candlelight'. It has a a nice grainy B&W mode, and another called 'Pinhole' which puts an interesting fuzzy frame around the image. Stay posted.

keeping busy

My apologies to my loyal readership. (The Regal Vizsla does have 13 Followers, so I think that counts for some measure of loyalty.) I have been fretting a little over what to do with my dogglers, The Mominator and Mr. Enthusiasm.

There's an adage that says that the owner-trainer-handler will screw up their first bird-dog just because, well, it's your first bird-dog. And Momo's tendency to get a little creepy at times is, when I'm honest with myself, the product of my ignorance and mixed messages. And trying to repeat the same command simply louder only makes his skin thicker.

And so I've been trying to be mindful of that as Jozsi grows up, trying to keep things light but clear and firm, trying to find the line between over-training and under-training, and trying to channel all his energy and application without curbing it. As folks who do read this blog regularly will know, I've been trying to figure out why he had started to creep a little and occasionally pop birds. And along the way, he started to flag on point. And while I initially thought it might be over-confidence (him just sooo excited to go in for a bird), I now think it might be a lack of confidence (because if I find him standing completely rigid, it's because he has the bird in view, too). A lack of confidence as a result of what, I have genuinely no idea. And the answer might just be developmental.

This fall I spent time getting him on wild birds that wouldn't sit still for his creeping, using launchers, and then settling on using Higgins Remote Releasers instead. These allow me to keep a bird in a spot I want him to find one in, to have the bird be fully awake (and not dizzied or slept) and therefore able to flush whenever it feels pressured, and my timing with the remote doesn't have to be quite as spot-on as it does with a launcher. And, unlike a launcher, it is completely quiet. With both devices, you do also need to be sure to find birds that can fly.

But in the last month or so, I've decided to come even further back to basics with him: the checkcord and the no-hurt collar, overlayed with the e-collar. The point of all of these tools, at least in the West-Gibbons method (as illustrated by the Steady with Style blog), is communication not necessarily correction, per se. The blunt brads on the no-hurt collar serve to provide a leverage point so you can pop the strap and buckle and create an acoustic as well as a tactile cue; while it does use electric stimulation or 'shock,' the e-collar is used at a level to merely get the dog's attention rather than apply corrective pressure -- and obviously liberates the dog and handler from the checkcord. Perhaps I should just have re-read The Bird Dog Training Manual. As Bill West student, Dave Walker writes in his foreword: "Repetition and consistency are essential. The training is not linear; it is cyclic... You must constantly go over previously learned experiences as you introduce new ones." (p.xv) And so, I've been going back over heeling with the collar and e-collar, and getting Jozsi reacquainted to the cues.

The first picture is of Jozsi from last Thursday, standing tall in a snowstorm. He's not wearing his collar and checkcord because we'd successfully completed two repetitions beforehand and I wanted him to both test him slightly and reward him by letting him run free. And he did his job beautifully, despite the weather and his father messing with a camera.

The next picture is from this morning. I had gone up to TMT with three friends from work, to serve as their guide and to get in some training with both boys. And while I would love Momo to stand still and not anticipate the flush, the fact remains that despite being 'our first birddog,' he does all kinds of things really well. And he looks lovely here.

And while Momo hauled in a bushel of birds, the highlight of the day was taking Jozsi out for a little structured training. In an attempt to keep him fired up and hopefully settle his tail, I wanted one of my friends to shoot a bird, to see if he'd stay steady-to-fall, and to send him out as if for a retrieve. (I say 'as if' because I haven't done hardly anything with him.) And all I can say is it felt like almost two years ago, that moment when I realised I might have something really special on my hands. He was in full uniform -- no-hurt collar, e-collar and checkcord -- and stopped nicely with only scent and no clear view of the Releaser. I styled him up, dropped the cord, and flushed the chukar. Ed knocked it down mostly dead and there was Jozsi, still standing, rapt. And probably to his surprise, I told him to 'bring it'. And he did, even after bobbling the kicking bird. It was like watching that almost-5mos old puppy all over again.

And I had the brains to listen the voice in my head that said, 'Stop now. He was perfect. Let him hold that as his last memory of the day.' Here's hoping that this was the first of many perfect days.

the weekend's trip to Arizona

For those of you who may pay attention to my Dopplr widget on the right there, we just got back from a trip to Flagstaff to see our good friends, Denise and Steve. As ever, we sat around, hung out, admired Steve's beautiful handmade bicycles, ate delicious homemade food, enjoyed gorgeous views, and the sharp contrasts in climate between Flagstaff at 7000' and Sedona at 4500' or Camp Verde at around 3400'. Here's a fun picture courtesy of Steve of me with Chuck, a vizsla-wannabe, a sweet sweet hound belonging to their friend, Barry. Thanks Denise + Steve for the hospitality!

I was eager to get back to Flagstaff since my new love of horses and dogs and try to find the answers to a few things that folks who actually ride horses a lot might know. And so our first destination was Gene's in downtown Flagstaff. First off, I went looking for jeans that a) I could actually try on, and b) were actually meant for riding horses. Trying to decipher fit information and buy jeans over the internet has been a real pain. All I really wanted was a pair of jeans that was a little slimmer fit to wear under chaps, but not too slim to inhibit me getting up and down off a horse, with a leg shaped to stack over a boot, and flat seams (not rolled) seams on the inside leg. I ended up with a couple of pairs of Cinch Green Labels. Apparently I am now 'a man who lives his life in denim'.

I've also been experimenting with riding boots. I wore smoother-soled hunting boots when I first started, but could already appreciate that these weren't ideal. So I bought some Ariat pull-ons and immediately felt the difference -- keeping my heels low in the stirrups was now easy, while the snug fit around the instep actually tired my feet out less -- but I would still come out after a long ride with a stiff ankle or two from slightly angled stirrups. Having liked my pull-ons, I bought some Ariat lace-ups and wore them all week at Nationals. There's an obvious trade-off in terms of safety when you switch to a lace-up (because the boot will no longer pull off if you get hung up in a stirrup), but the positive trade-off for me is that I have more energy and better ankle support for doing groundwork. There's also one theory that, in addition to sheltering the foot from either brush or cold, hooded stirrups or tapaderos also prevent the foot from slipping too far forward and getting hooked up. (Incidentally, Wikipedia has two great articles on both stirrups and Western riding.)

Everything comes around: I remember Steve talking about White's boots when he used to work as a backcountry firefighter. And as I spoke to various working horse folk about what kinds of footwear they recommended, many kept coming back to White's packer boots. And Gene's may be the only dealer still left in Arizona. So, off I went. They didn't have any in a size close to my foot, but I did get to see them and admire just how solid they are. But this raised another question: why does the packer boot have such a pronounced underslung heel? The closest I could get to an answer was that it is a 'riding heel' and so while not as pronounced as some pull-on cowboy boots, arguably its function is to avoid the boot slipping forward and getting hung on the stirrup. Drawing on several sources, Larry at HotBoots states that the idea of prominent heels on riding boots originally came from the legions of Mongol horseman that conquered Europe -- whose prominent heels were painted bright red. For those of us not riding technical Western competitions like reining or cutting, and riding in big, hooded stirrups, a packer looks like a good choice.

I also went to Flagstaff so I could hear constant re-runs of the Pace Salsa ad ("Noooo York City") at my expense.

The real highlight of my trip to Flagstaff, though, was the opportunity to meet someone I'd only ever spoken to on the phone after an introduction from one of our breeders, Lisa DeForest. Bill Gibbons is something of a lightning rod within the vizsla community -- he handled the winning dog in four vizsla National Field Championships (AKC) but then won and took runner-up in the inaugural National Vizsla Association National Classic. Rumors abounded that his great dog, Gabe, was (or had to be) part pointer -- although I happen to think anyone handling the winning dogs in a organization absolutely committed to the hard-hunting portion of the vizsla's personality, an organization that had splintered away from the monolith of the AKC was likely to be tarred in that way. Lisa thought the world of him -- and as we discovered, he had trained Jozsi's brother, Rocko, for her -- and I just wanted the chance to meet him. We had spoken on the phone about getting coffee when I was next through Phoenix but my heart slipped a little when he said he wasn't going to be in Phoenix when we flew in.

It then turned out he was going to be a ways north up around Verde Valley, a mere 60 miles south of Flagstaff, with a string of dogs he was working from horseback. And so he invited me to come by and maybe come out with him while he worked. I have only four words to describe my reaction: giddy as a schoolgirl. While it felt a little like 'No Country for Old Men' trying to find his trailer out in the middle of seemingly nowhere, I found him. We chatted a bit and he asked me about my horsemanship... again, I think the Pace advertisement came up at least once... trying to size me up to see if his horse, Diamond, would be taking me for a ride. I understood his concern, but off we went with his first couple of dogs. (These days, Bill has mostly setters and pointers, and arguably mostly hunting dogs rather than trial dogs, nevertheless he's still got a bunch with some zip.) The picture is of Bill and I scouting Max and Pearl on the next ridge; if you click on the picture to enlarge it and look hard in the upper center, you'll see Pearl coming back in.

The next picture is of Max on point. It's just here because I like looking at dogs with nice tails. Bill heads up to Verde Valley to take advantage of the space and the wild birds, mostly Gambel's quail. (Depending on where a dog is in its development, he also uses carded pigeons and soft-planted bobwhite quail. Most of his technique and philosophy can be found at Steady with Style.) And while Max's point happened to be on a bobwhite that had escaped and was trying to get back to its buddies in their johnny-house, we came across a fair number of Gambel's hiding out in broomthorn thickets. For someone in the northeast, it seemed like there were plenty of birds but I gather the almost-decade-long drought has drastically affected quail numbers.

By lunchtime, Bill was already feeling comfortable with my horsemanship; by the end of the afternoon, as we tried to locate two young dogs, Speck and Gracie, who had simply lit out for the horizon, mostly likely initially one egging the other on, Bill sent me down a steep shale slope into an arroyo packed with broomthorn and catclaw to scout out that wash and meet him about 3/4mile further down. Thank heaven for a good horse -- and I think by the end of the day, Diamond and I had come to trust one another. I would trust him to find his footing and he would, in turn, trust my judgement (and higher vantage point) to find our way through the thickets.

As for the two dogs: as Bill's wife returned from a scouting trip down towards the road about a mile away, she returned to find Gracie lying down at her spot on the string, apparently none the worse for wear. The amusing conclusion to the mildly harrowing afternoon was that, first, her owner called Bill to check in to see how she was doing just as Bill arrived back in camp to find her; then, Speck's owner called and, imagining that it was because someone had called him to say that they had found Speck in the back of nowhere, Bill settled in to tell the story. It seems that Speck might have done this before -- but, and literally as his owner reassured him that Speck would return, the dog ambled into camp looking a little tired but still absolutely jacked to go back out if allowed.

It was a great day in a great weekend. Hope I'll get to do it again. In the meanwhile, it's back to Nooooo Yorrrk City.

happy new year + a few highlights

I hope my family reads this blog. I hope they realise that a) the reason I didn't write half as many blog posts this year is b) the same reason Meg and I haven't sent out our New Year's cards yet. I work in retail... it would appear that the economy is in some state of recovery.

In any case, between the heavy weather that nailed the East Coast and a couple of seven-day weeks, it's been difficult to keep up with the training routine that I had almost established with the boys. And so what happens when you take our two boys out for the first time in two weeks? Lots of imperfect, a few shades of ugly, falling in love all over again, and some nice omens for the future.

With Momo, it drives me nuts that he does the 'difficult' things (like the honor and the retrieve) well, but still insists on catwalking now and again. With Jozsi, however, I realise that all his extra-stepping isn't cockiness but uncertainty. I don't know where this comes from, but I know that if I walk up on him and his tail is rock-solid, he can see the bird as well as smell it. He just needs more birds and more reassurance.

While both boys popped a bird or two (and a bird that flushes because they took an extra step is an even better teaching tool than me nicking either one with the e-collar), they both showed why we love them dearly. Momo has a great nose, a great retrieve, and needs little to no work on his honor and he loves to hunt with you. Jozsi, on the other hand, only knows how to hunt really, really hard -- he was running hedgerow covers like a crazy man, handling at complete ease at 300 yds -- and today also showed some inkling that he knows what an honor is. And so, here's to our boys...

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This is also the time to acknowledge a few great musical highlights of 2009.

Khaled: Liberté: I was so relieved to hear this album. I can carry grudges for a long period of time, and somehow his US agent convinced him to release a 'friends' album five years ago that was, to my mind, an abomination against God. I don't care how great Carlos Santana is, but I can never hear him play guitar without hearing Rob Thomas. And I loath Rob Thomas. In contrast to several of his previous albums which were hampered by too many synthesized sounds and over-production, this is stripped down -- and leaves with you with a much greater appreciation for Khaled's talent and for Algerian music, both modern and traditional.

Buika, El Ultimo Trago: last year's album Niña de Fuego was great. With the addition of Cuban

piano player, Chucho Valdes, the arrangements are a little richer -- but nothing eclipses Buika's smokey voice.

Rosalia de Souza, D'Improviso: I know only a little bit about Brazilian music and it seems like a fair amount of it is produced for export -- a little too sweet, a little too cheesey. This is a great mixture of upbeat and downbeat, crisp, clean, and I'm still listening to it every day. And here's one of my favorite tracks:

There are also some interesting Top-10 lists at NPR's All Songs Considered -- and Scampwalker at Eight More Miles has a bunch of picks I have never heard of either.

trials and tribulations

This past weekend was the CVVC's December walking trial. We had so (too) many dogs last year that we petitioned to expand it to a two-day trial -- and managed to enroll 103 starters for 8 stakes. Zoiks! I know we turned away some folks and wonder if the level of interest was because we are both the last trial of the northeast season and because it was a walking trial only. In any case, it was great as a member of the trial committee to see both familiar faces and a fair number of new ones, too. It was also great to work with a committed team of fellow volunteers to make everything go smoothly and with as much fun as possible!

With training still in full session for both my boys and Meg able to keep them at home, I was able to give a full two-day commitment to helping keep the trial moving along. It would have been lovely to have them there for them to meet friends, but I couldn't have relaxed quite as much or focussed on the tasks at hand... namely organizing the raffle and bird-planting.

And bird-plant I did, all from horseback and, with just a couple of braces' exception, all off a wrangler's horse named Travis. I've ridden some scary-ass wranglers' horses in the past -- but Travis was great. 'Great' is a relative term... he isn't Cypress, Larry, or PC... but for a wrangler's horse forced to put up with a multitude of mixed-ability riders for long hours and low pay, he did great as a bird-planter's horse. For the less-familiar, horses have to fulfill a variety of functions at field-trials: gallery horses, judges' horses, scouting horses, bird-planting horses, and handler's horses. Arguably, a gallery horse just needs to be able to stop, start, and follow the rest of its pack (although one should never entirely presume that a gallery horse has been desensitized to gunfire); in most cases, a judge's horse needs to be comfortable at the front and willing to go off on its own with its rider (ie. not be 'herd-bound'); the same is true for a bird-planter's horse, although the horse also needs to be desensitized to the flapping, cheeping quail in the birdbag on its back; scouting and handling horses cannot be herd-bound and must also park out, ie. when the rider has dismounted and dropped reins, the horse needs to stand still and not wander off. In short, a field trial horse needs to be pretty skilled, if not merely familiar with the game itself.

I did encourage at least one newcomer to come check out the whole field-trial game... and why not with a Puppy? After coming to the VCCNE's Versatility Day back in August, John came down from Portland with his Luna for the Open Puppy stake on Sunday. Luna is a recent pup from an Octane and Seeker pairing and I can see both dogs in her. While she was heavily outnumbered by older, bigger, GSPs, she did well for her first outing -- and I hope John will stick with it at least till our Spring trial!


And if I am not going to be running dogs at a trial, I am pretty content to ride a horse instead. And so I spent 12hrs over the next two days atop Travis (mostly), trotting along with the judges in each stake, and fast-balling quail into the cover. One of the highpoints was a compliment on my horsemanship from someone who has since become a friend. In any case, Tom was one of the first folk to encourage me to handle Mr. Enthusiasm from a horse but for whatever reason, hasn't really seen me ride in 5-6mos. It was a nice bonus on a cold, blustery morning.

I did have my first unscheduled equine dismount, however. Travis and I had taken a cast off to a likely spot to drop a bird (after some 5hrs in the saddle, I might add) and, once done, he decided he wanted to canter back to the rest of the group. No problem. However, he caught a front hoof, dropped a shoulder, and in that moment of clarity I realized I was going to forward roll off to the side into the marshy turf. Which I did, back to my feet. I would have done a full gymnastic arm-raise, but the horse was now loose and didn't need to be spooked further by the Russian judge raising the '10' scorecard. Someone in the group gathered Travis up; he and I reassured each other we were both fine and still loved each other; and off we went again for another hour or so.

Gin at High Mountain Horse encouraged me to share the following: at Nationals I was riding horses I knew and who knew me and got in the (bad) habit of riding in a ballcap. I realized my horsemanship had significantly improved during Nationals as I survived my horse being spooked by another that had broken free and was running wild -- but spooked so hard it broke its curb chain (and thereby rendered the 'brakes' largely inoperable); a horse that slipped in the mud and went to both front knees before getting up; and another that reared as I was trying to mount. After that week of incidents but no mishaps, Audra and I vowed to start wearing our helmets again. As Gin said in e-mail to me:

"I don't ride in a helmet, but rarely run around like you do. Head injuries are all too real with horses... Horses do trip! And when we fall, our head does tend to be the first to touch down. I really, really want to keep my brain. If I start endurance running, I'm investing in a helmet. My brain is worth it."

And that's all I have to say about that.

*******

Mercifully before the truly crapulent weather beset us today, I did manage to get a nice training day in with the boys at our friend Andrew's property upstate to keep them honest. And both boys did well. I am grateful to have found a quail breeder who, however he does it, raises spooky, well-flying quail. And I am pretty much planting the birds with little or no dizzying. I know my boys can find birds, but the fine-tuning I'm looking for is how they deal with running birds, wild flushes, and bumps.

Andrew was able to come out for most of it and serve as a gunner for The Mominator during his two big runs. It's nice to have a second set of hands, especially when they're deft with a shotgun. Here's Momo with Andrew in the background ready to drop the quail. What's interesting about the two boys' personalities is that Momo might get too close to a bird and pop it unexpectedly, but will immediately re-calibrate and rarely pop another. Jozsi seems to stand off his birds pretty well for the first round, then gets a little cocky, and then always manages to bring it back around.

This picture is from Mr. 200mph's first run of the day, and as much as I love The Mominator, watching The Beast eat up ground and then stick a point at a skid is just a thrill-ride. On his first run of close to 45mins, he found and handled a half-dozen birds including this lovely high pose roughly 10yds from the birds. He is now getting to a point where, if I lose sight and then sound of him, I know to sing his praises and just start looking for him standing someplace.

His tail hasn't quite settled yet, but we've begun to hit a nice groove where he knows what will make me happy. While this is arguably a mixed blessing, but his stop-to-flush is much more reliable than not -- and in the two instances where he thought he would take a step to be absolutely sure, my spooky quail got up, flushed and ruined his party without me having to do anything. On a couple of instances, he did establish a point in dense hedgerow cover and I couldn't produce a bird for him - presumably because the bird had run on hearing me approach -- and I was able to send him on to relocate. And while he didn't subsequently find one of those two birds, as importantly he didn't let his fiery personality get the better of him and try to tackle a bird on the ground. This is also progress and a sign that his young brain is beginning to mature and settle.

Hopefully the weather won't close out our training season too soon. Things seem to be coming together for both of them!