This past weekend we had perfect weather for training.  It was cool with a light breeze and no bugs.

First, I wanted to explain about the ducks we use since so many of you had questions about yesterday’s post.  We usually get our training ducks from those left over after a hunt test.  Most clubs will make the left over ducks available after all of the stakes are finished.  You have to sort through and find any that are still in decent shape because after two or three days use, they can get kind of nasty.  We also get them from our trainer.  Most trainers have live ducks and a supply of frozen ducks.  We keep ours in the freezer and if they are still in good condition after we use them, they go back in the freezer for another use.  Since we used these ducks all weekend (including in the water) they were too nasty to be reused.

We periodically work the dogs on ducks, specially if we are working on a particular training issue.  For example these are some of the issues we wanted to work on last weekend:

• Thunder was working on giving up his birds.  He is doing fine in training, we will see how he does at the test.
• Storm is working on not breaking from the line.  We used ducks and our winger to bring her excitement level up.  We will see how she does Friday at the test.
• Freighter is working on general line manners. being steady, and holding and bringing his duck all the way back to his handler.  We also did not mind that the ducks got nasty because as he moves to the higher level stakes, he is likely to come across nasty ducks and we needed to make sure he would pick those up.  He is doing well in training with all of these things.

Throughout the weekend, we kept these items in mind as we set up our training scenarios.  Our holding blind also arrived so we used that and our mock gun so that the dogs came out of the blind and to the line the way they should at a test.  We are trying to be very consistent with this so the dogs understand the routine and hopefully will repeat it at a test.

These are the training set-ups we ran on Sunday.  Saturday we were in a different area and did different set-ups.

We set our land marks close.  We did a walk up double.  Again, we were working on the dogs being steady.  A walk-up is where the handler and dog walk up to the line and as they are walking the bird is released in a surprise situation.  The birds are supposed to be 35-45 yards away from the dog.  Once the bird is in the air, the handler can say “sit” or blow a whistle to get the dog to sit, then any other birds are launched and the dog must remain steady until sent to retrieve.

This was our double:

I have indicated which mark is the “memory” bird and which mark is the “go” bird.  Normally the dog would pick up the “go” bird first although it is not required.

All the dogs did really well on this.  We have been working on walk ups with Freighter and he has been steady in training.

Some pictures:

Next we ran a water double.  Mark #1 was in high cover on the bank.  Mark #2 fell along the edge of the pond.  We were testing the older dogs to make sure they would stay in the water and not cheat the bank.  We moved the line a bit for Freighter because his training is not as advanced as the older dogs and we really just wanted him to work on his doubles.  The first mark in heavy cover was enough of a challenge for him.

Some pictures:

The last two things we worked on were blinds.  For the land blind we fired a diversion shot to mess with the dogs’ minds a bit.  I sat out in the field with a white hat and white shirt so that I was clearly visible to the dogs (just like when I threw the marks earlier).  Thunder blew the land blind at the last test because he was sure he should get a bird that went with the shot.  But there was no bird and the blind was in a different position.  Having me sit in the field definitely pulled him toward me, but his handler worked him through it.  Freighter did the best on this.  I think it is because he is inexperienced and was happy to let his handler show him where the bird was.

The water blind we set in heavy cover and it required the dogs to go through the water marks we had run earlier.  Freighter needed work to get him in the cover (we have not run this set up before with him).  He got it eventually.  We re-ran him and he pretty much lined it the second time.  We will work on more blinds set back in cover.

Some pictures, (it was difficult to get decent pictures of the blinds because of where I was sitting.)

We reserved the field for 4 hours.  We used every bit of the time.  We got a lot accomplished.  It was such a beautiful day, I could have spent the whole day out there.