birdie's first duck hunt

birdie went on her first duck hunt this morning. it is the early season so you can only shoot teal and wood ducks. we managed one hen wood duck. it was a long shot and she did not see the bird go down. i pulled out of the duck blind within birdies retrieving range. i sent her out on a "blind" retrieve and she found the duck. i missed my second woodie but shot a moorhen from the duck blind to give her another retrieve. she marked it and brought it back to hand like a pro. i will post videos of the retrieves later. congrats on your first duck birdie girl!

quail again

went out to train birdie again today over quail. she did great! she picks sent up so fast. shes holding point and whoaing much better than last time. spent most of the day with her on the check cord to hold on wing and shot. she also backed ritter for about 5 birds. she found one bird that had snuck out on us. we turned around and saw birdie on point about 20 feet away. ritter picked up and backed birdie. that was very cool! she does a great job retrieving to hand. my favorite of the day was when she marked a bird that flew off next to a pond and pointed it with half her body in the water and half out.

retrieve from friday

more moorhen

friday i took a former student to shoot moorhen. he has been asking for years to go hunting with me. he is now in college and finally got his hunter safety and hunting license. i told him that moorhens were not very sporting but he still wanted to go. he plans to go duck hunting with me this season. he shot 13 moorhen with one really nice shot on the wing. birdie did great. my highlight of the morning was when she marked a bird down jumped in without a push and retrieved the bird. last time i had to show her where the birds were and give her an extra push out of the boat. seems she is putting together gun shot with bird down. she made two retrieves like that and several more that i tossed for her. she loves watching all the birds fly in the morning.

videos from toho

birdie on toho

waiting for the action to start








birdie checking out a purple gallinule and wondering why we cant shoot it


taken with my canon camera after my dive in the lake


birdie looking at me as if im crazy


took birdie out to toho this morning to watch and listen to birds. she did great. her eyes were almost always on the sky which is a good thing. she sat still (for the most part) and didnt whine (until i t was time to get in the water). it is moorhen season which i usually do not hunt for but i thought it would be a good waterfowl intro for birdie. after sitting for about an hour i decided to shoot a few to see if birdie would retrieve it. she is not comfortable with jumping out of the boat yet even though she loves to swim. the next moorhen that came by died and i polled over to show it to birdie. she wanted it but was unwilling to jump. i picked it up and showed it to her then tossed it back out. she whined and paced the boat but would not go in. when she started pawing at the water i decided to give her a little help into the water. she swam straight to the bird and retrieved to hand. we did this about 4 times. i polled around looking for a few more birds to take and use for training at home. somehow during this i lost my balance and fell into the water, lost my glasses and submerged my iphone that was in my pocket. since i was already wet i decided to take the opportunity to cox birdie into a few jumps on her own. after the first one i began to throw the moorhen for her to fetch and she jumped of her own will and retrieved to hand about 6 more times. i decided to pack it up and call it a day. in spite of the accident we had a great morning that turned out to be another good training session. i took my phone apart and dried everything off and it seems to be working fine.

birdie on quail

the video as promised. it is in chronological order. you can see her get better as they go along. i missed a few good points but got a good amount of footage. she is 4 months old now.

first live birds

took birdie out today with a friend (clay wilson) that also has and trains gsp for quail hunting. birdie had so much fun. she did great with her first live birds. she found all the ones we placed out for her and pointed and whoaed great for a 4 month old. clay was especially impressed by her nose and ability to fetch birds and deliver to hand. i didnt get a lot of pics while training because i was busy with birdie but here are a few pics of her pointing and playing with his two dogs (ritter and lexi). i have a few videos that i will be posting soon.

on point

a pic of birdie on point. it is from a video so very low quality. we will be training with live quail on saturday. really looking forward to it.

cooling off

some water play pictures. after training i always take birdie over to the neighbor hood i grew up in to cool off and do some water fetching.

whistle with some distance

working on whistle commands from a distance. she has a tendency to want to come with the sit command but she is getting it.

training at the lakehouse

we stayed at a friends lakehouse while our house being tented this week. birdie loved all the open space for running around and the lake has a very gradual slope into the water which made it an ideal place for water retrieval training. birdie has been swimming many times but i have never been able to get her to retrieve a dummy while in the water. first toss at the lakehouse and she looked like a pro. there is some marshy area that she loved tromping around in which is a very good thing because she will be doing a lot of retrieves in that type of cover. she also enjoyed hunting and pointing at dragon flies. what a great pup!

hunt em up and fetch em up

sorry about the camera quality. it was shot and uploaded to youtube with my phone. it was hard to handle birdie and the camera at the same time. i took birdie out today and hid three duck wings in an open field while i left her in the car. she found all three very quickly. its fun to watch her pick up the sent and narrow it down. this was the first time hiding wings for her. the second video is just sit, stay, fetch, come and heel with a duck wing. not too bad for a 14 week old pup. im very pleased with her progress.

jump birdie jump

took birdie out on the boat again the other day. wanted to see if i could get her to jump out of the boat and swim. i tried throwing in a few of her dummies and though she acted like she wanted to get them she was not going to jump in. finally i got out of the boat to give her some encouragement. it took a little while but she finally jumped in for me and swam around. she jumped in about 5 times total. we called it a day and went for a joy ride to find some birds to look at. she especially enjoyed the moorhens and all the noise they were making.