"Never knew a man not to be improved by a dog.” ~
Robert Ruark
So, there I was, grounded by heart disease, casting around
for something to fill my time. The first
six months or so were filled with drug regimen, cardiac rehab sessions three
times a week and weight loss.
As the weather warmed, I decided that I was going to take up
Trap Shooting. It had always fascinated
me and the Fishbowl United Sportsmen's Club up near the cabin in Wisconsin had really cheap
rates. So, I started going there to
shoot, made friends, joined a league team that I dragged the average down on
and had a generally good time all that summer.
Improved at shooting enough to peak out around an 18 out of 25
average.
At the same time, I was discovering that our cabin I had
been going to for years was deep in the heart of prime Ruffed Grouse
habitat. Who knew? So, come that fall, I started blundering in the woods, trying to find the wily grouse. It is a testament to their bounty that I
actually bagged one or two that year. Certainly,
it does not reflect on my hunting skill.
At the time, we had a dog.
Velvet was a truly great doggy buddy.
Half Yellow Lab, Half Golden Retriever, she was smart and a great
walking buddy. We got her through the
RAGOM rescue operation when she was 5 years old. She was also gun shy to the max and firing a
gun around her would drive her away for hours.
I did it exactly once and never again.
Velvet and I worked together and I had her to the “Come,
Sit, Stay, Good dog!” level of training.
I could trust her to walk the trails of Lebanon Hills Park off leash and
call her to me to sit so she wouldn’t jump on other hikers. I thought I was pretty hot stuff as a dog
trainer as Velvet would do things that few other dogs would. Which is more a testament to how poorly most
dogs are trained than it is to my mastery.
Velvster had a slow growing cancer and it finally caught up
to her late that fall. The picture below was Miss October in the RAGOM's 2016 calendar. I loved that dog.
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| Velvet waits for the squirrel |
As I came out of the grief over her, I realized an
opportunity I had always wanted was open to me.
I had copious free time, cheap access to good hunting territory and an
open card for a dog. It was time to try
out being a bird dog owner.
I had flown some time back with a guy who had an AKC
Champion Lab that he hunted with. He had
told me that “Gun Dog” was the book I needed to read if I wanted an entry into
bird dog training. So, I went on Amazon,
found an original copy, ordered it and devoured it in one night’s reading. I was set.
It was time to find a dog.
Ann and I are Golden Retriever people.
We’ve had a family dog since Jaybo was 2. Velvet was the third of the dogs. We’d bought Tawny as a puppy and gotten
Ricochet from RAGOM when he was about 1 year old after Tawny Dog passed. So, it seemed natural to get a golden.
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| Tawny |
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| Ricochet |
It was also natural to look at RAGOM again for a dog. Problem being, while older dogs in need of
rescue are manifold, puppies are almost impossible to rescue through
RAGOM. And Gun Dog highly recommended
that you get your hunting dog as young as possible, 7 weeks old if you could,
and get it identified with you early.
So, I did another internet search, found Sharptail Ridge Kennels
up in NW MN and called them. I got put
on a waiting list with them.
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| From Front to Back, Phoebe, Rowdy, Archie and Ann |
At the same time as this was going on, I had for years known
my brother-in-law’s Labradoodle. Phoebe
is a really great dog and she intrigued me. Most important, she does not shed. I read up a little on Golden Doodles and found
that people had some success with hunting them.
Then serendipity happened.
I was walking down the driveway to get the mail when a
pleasant neighbor lady with a nice big, well behaved Golden Doodle walked
by. I had seen her once before walking
around the neighborhood. I introduced
myself and asked her where she had gotten her dog. We talked a bit, I got the mail and went
inside to look up Red Cedar Farms on the internet.
At the time, my goal was to get a puppy that I could train
all spring, summer and fall so that it would turn roughly 1 year old in late fall
next year. Gun Dog said this was the best
timing you could do for a dog you wanted to hunt.
Red Cedar told me that, “Why yes, we will have a litter in mid-November
and yes, we do have openings.” So, I got
to write an essay telling Red Cedar Farms about our family and why we wanted a
dog and we got put on the list.
We picked Rowdy up in January when he turned 7 weeks
old. At the time, my biggest worry was
that I knew nothing about how to expose a dog to shooting other than what I had
read in Gun Dog and that it was bad to screw it up. After some research, I learned that Tom Dokken’s Oak Ridge Kennels was just 20 miles south down I-35 and was highly
recommended. So, I called them, explained
what I wanted and got Rowdy signed up for Introductory Gun Dog school for two
weeks after he turned 6 months old in July.
Then I learned that there was this thing called “Pheasant Fest” and this year it was held in February at the Minneapolis Convention Center. So, I talked Ann and Katie into
going with me. I knew Dokken had a
booth there and I found them first thing.
I introduced myself, told them about my general level of beginner
ineptness, that Rowdy was signed up with them and what should I be doing? I got some great advice and found out that
one of the things I really needed to do was expose Rowdy to dead birds. If I would drive down to the kennel, they
would give me an actual dead pigeon of my very own to throw to Rowdy. How can you pass that up?
Ann had some questions about storing a dead pigeon, but in
general, in February, in Minnesota, storing a dead bird is not a very difficult
logistical problem. (On a side note,
here in late 2019, I have a dead duck, a dead pheasant and two dead Chukars
frozen in the downstairs freezer at the cabin in Wisconsin. Rowdy and I will use them a lot in the next
few months.)
Then I walked around the corner and another instance of
serendipity occurred. I met the guys
from Four Points Receiver Club, a chapter of NAHRA. We talked, I explained my situation and my
general level of ignorance and found out I could get a free membership in the
organization. Who can pass that up? Especially as I learned they had an afternoon
training group every Thursday all summer long.
In the meantime, Rowdy took to his retriever roots like gang
busters. He loved him some dead pigeon, loved
bringing it back and dancing around with it.
He was coming along nicely with Sit, Stay and less well, Heel. We flat wore that pigeon out.
Four Points started off their training year that spring of ’17
with a Saturday session at a member’s farm up in Stacy, MN. The owner has a really great training kennel
set up with a very nice technical water layout.
I had never seen high end retriever trainers do what they do before.
They had three ‘wingers’ (Katester once called them a "Duckapult" which made me snorf my coffee) setup in a triangle around the technical
pond. Two of the wingers were set to
land in the water and one was set to throw across the water onto the island in
the middle. They had blank guns at each
station. The demo went like this. The handler had the dog sit. The first winger honked on a duck call to get
the dog’s attention, shot his bumper up on a high arc to land in the water and
as the bumper flew fired his loud blank gun.
The next winger went through the honk, fling, shoot process to land his
bumper out on the island. Finally, the
last winger did the same thing to land the bumper in the water roughly 75 yards
away from the first bumper.
Through all this the dog just sat there and noted the
position of the falls. While quivering. On command from
the handler he then dashed/swam to each of the bumpers in the order
designated by the handler and returned to sit at the handler’s heel and give
the bumper up.
I was transfixed. I
did not know a dog could do this.
But wait! There’s
more. Then it was explained that the
handler would send the dog to find a blind bumper that was way out across the pond,
up on the shore, roughly 125 yards away.
The dog did not know where the bumper was and was totally reliant on the
handler for directions. The blind bumper is traditionally orange, to make it even harder for the dog to locate visually.
And that is exactly what happened. The dog took off swimming on a directional
path given by the handler. When he deviated
from the path, the handler would blow one tweet, the dog would turn around and
tread water. Another directional signal
and off the dog went again. And sure
enough, the dog went up on shore on the far side, found the bumper, swam back and sat to give up the bumper.
All I can say is that at this point, I was totally
hooked. Rowdy and I were going to learn
as much of this as we could.
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| Ann and Rowdy watch that first session in Stacy |
The guys at Four Points have been very accepting of my Golden
Doodle experiment, which is not saying I don't get kidded about my "Swamp Poodle." I’ve spent just about every Thursday of the last two years
at their training setup out in the Kelly Farms complex and Rowdy and I have
come a long way. It's a great way to spend an afternoon and I relish it.
By hunting season that fall, Rowdy associated a gunshot with an opportunity to go fetch a bumper or a dead bird and it excited him. At 8 months old he was a gun doodle.
We flushed and shot our first Ruffed Grouse in early Oct and one more later that month. We also flushed and shot a woodcock. We were both pretty excited. Retrieving to hand didn't come to us until hunting season this year. We've been working on blind retrieves for a while now with some success.....
On that note, I remain,
Dad/Geoff
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