Today we are joining Gizmo and Finn for Park Day.
Hosted By Gizmo and Finn
We are also joining Heart Like A Dog and co-host Sand Spring Chesapeakes for the Follow-up Friday blog hop.
It’s the the blog hop that lets you wrap up your week and leads you right into the weekend.
Hosted By Heart Like A Dog
Park Day
We went to a local park the weekend Freighter was home to do some training. Our local parks are not that interesting, but they do offer open space, some ponds and puddles in the Spring.
Neighborhood Park With Homes Along The Sides And Ducks In The Puddles
Puddles!
When we finished with the training, we threw Freighter some fun bumpers. Of course he had to find the best way to splash his way to the bumper.
Off To Get The Bumper
Got To Line Up Just Right
Get Ready
Leap
Splash
Fishing It Out
Got It!
Fun!
You may have noticed that Freighter squared up to the puddle and jumped in. That is pretty typical of a young dog. He will be learning to carry the line straight to the bumper.
Follow-up Friday 4-26-13
Breaking Birds
dogloverofmax@gmail.com asked:
Just curious as to why the breaker bird still, can you sorta give me a real life scenario where this would be used? Also what do you typically hunt and do with them?
I’m not sure I understand the question, but I will do my best to answer. 
“Breaking” is the term we us for whenever a dog “breaks” its sit before it is released. As you can imagine, a hunting dog needs to learn that sit means sit for its own safety, among other reasons. You don’t want a dog to take off the minute it hears gunfire, sees a bird fall or a bird is flushed while upland hunting.
We constantly train our dogs to be steady (or to sit and stay). Sometimes we use what we call “breaking birds” to do this. These are bumpers or birds thrown in close proximity to a dog and/or from an unexpected direction. The surprise can sometimes catch the dog off guard and really test the dog’s “sit”. This is not unlike something that might happen during a day of hunting and birds may come from an unexpected direction or flush or fall close to the dog.
Sand Spring Chesapeakes wrote:
We had to do a live flyer breaking bird last week to get ready for the hunt test as Gambler decided he needed to leave early for the flyer in training. No sir you sit til your told to go!
Been there with Storm. It was a Master test and the first series. She broke and was out before she started.
finnhoward asked:
How many times do you tend to do the same thing in practice like this?
It depends. You want to get some training value out of what you do, you are not looking for perfection at that moment. We ran the breaking birds as back to back singles. For some dogs, it might be difficult for them not to break their sit for the first bird and for some it might be the second bird. For marks and blinds, if a dog does it perfectly, you probably would not run it again at that training session although you would probably run a similar set up on another day. Many times when we are running marks, we will run them and then move over slightly and run again and then run some blinds. Every time you run multiple marks and blinds in the same field, it can make it more difficult for the dog.
Thanks for the all of your questions and comments. I appreciate them.
This weekend we are supposed to finally have warmer weather. We plan to visit both Freighter and Storm. Its kind of like parents whose kids are away at school. We will spend the whole day driving and visiting.
Have a nice weekend!
Thanks to Gizmo and Finn for hosting Park Day.
Thanks to Heart Like A Dog and Sand Spring Chesapeakes for hosting the Follow-up Friday blog hop.
This is a blog hop!
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