Hampton gets another leg

Bill and Sandy D. were wise enough to turn their English Springer Spaniel over to Kim Parkman to run in the ESS Hunt Test. Hampton is a Master-class dog and Bill can't run him right now and Sandy readily acknowledges that she would not be able to step in yet.

Kim has trained Hampton, and he responds very well to her. Hampton and Kim were easy to watch. No need to hold your breath with those two in the field, although we did that anyway.

Hampton appears to come out of his shoes to flush a bird. He is hupping on the flush.


The energetic beauty of an English Springer Spaniel


A dog with a job to do.

Bill and Sandy get a chance to celebrate with a soaking wet gundog as Marilyn looks on.

Bill gets dragged across the field as Hampton tries to corral his posse.

Scenes from the English Springer Spaniel Hunt Test

It was cold in the mornings. It was windy on Saturday. Sunday warmed as the day progressed because the bluster was gone. The birds were big and physical, which is what you want for a Hunt Test. Birds that get up and fly. Hopes and anxieties ran high, as they always do. The dogs were affected by all of this as well. Though some slept in peaceful oblivion while waiting their turns, others keened or pawed at their kennels from the sights, smells, sounds, and vibrancy of the day.

Here are a few scenes, courtesy of Gary Depp of In-Motion Photos.

Graham heads for home.

Marilyn and Graham review the field.

Graham on the hunt.

Spike breaks cover.

Spike zeros in.

Moses brings one in.

Moses gets back to work.

Moses and Tim take a breather after Moses' fifth and final leg of his Master Hunter title quest.

ESS test results

Just some overall impressions, with some details to follow.

Everyone was pleased for Bill and Sandy's Hampton, the ESS with everything going for him. Pocataligo Kennel's Kim Parkman ran Hampton to a Master leg on Sunday. There was no question that the dog was going to meet all of the requirements. He hunted with skill, verve, and discipline. Well done, boy.

Amy's Clumber Spaniel Emma posted a Senior leg on Sunday as well. I think Amy willed Emma to finish it off. There was no running along the edge of the pond, just a dip in, a swim to the downed bird, and a nice finish to hand.

Some tough weekend stories. Frank M's Bibi had it all going for her on Saturday. The American Cocker ran a disciplined Master Hunter leg for not one, or two, but three birds. She broke on a tough call on bird number four. That bird went up and into the trees and was shot as it was flying about the limbs. There seemed to be some confusion (to me) about whether Bibi was sent or not, but at any rate, she took off after it (or "broke") and was disqualified. That was as tough an outing as I can recall for a fine dog.

Susan W's Tatum was disqualified on Sunday after moving beyond the end of the course. Unhappily, there were birds back there, in the woods past the course, and that little Welsh Springer Spaniel took it upon herself to hunt them up. Just a bit more length to the course could have made all of the difference.

J-Clarke takes Westminster 2012 BOB

GCh Ivywild's Lookin' to Skeldale RN (J-Clarke) won Best of Breed at this year's Westminster Kennel Club show, and it was much deserved. JC looked great, moved great, and looked classy relative to the other dogs, nice though they were. (Unhappily, the video is no longer available at the Westminster website.)

Owner Mary Johnson said that she couldn't find the words to express her feelings, other than thinking that J-Clarke and Ryan accomplished more in 2011 than she could ever have thought, and then topped it off by the BOB win.

That's very tough competition in the Westminster ring and everything has to line up perfectly to get the win, and that's what happened with J-Clarke and handler Ryan Wolfe.

J-Clarke and handler Ryan Wolfe pose with the royal purple and gold Best of Breed ribbon.

How a spaniel hunts

Each type of gundog has a particular way of hunting. The fundamental distinction is whether the dog flushes or points.

A pointing dog ranges far and wide in his hunt for the bird. For big running dogs like German Shorthair Pointerse, the hunter might put a GPS on the dog just to find him.

When the pointing dog comes upon a bird, he stops and points. The dog may strike the classic pointing stance: which is front paw raised, nose aimed at the bird, and tail up (if he has an undocked tail). The hunter locates his dog and hikes to him. He then walks up to the bird and the dog, and basically kicks up the bird to shoot it.

(Click on photos to see entire picture.)

A Brittany on point. Photo courtesy of Central New Mexico Brittany Club.

A pointing dog may work for a bird that hunkers down and holds his ground. But some birds, like pheasant, do not hold, they run. In fact, a pheasant, like many galiforms would rather run than fly.

A pheasant hunter wants a close working dog: a dog that hunts within gun range. The dog must aggressively charge into the cover where the bird has hidden itself and give the bird no choice but to fly.

That is what the spaniel does. The spaniel searches the field by quartering in the "halo," or area in front of the hunter that is in reasonable shooting distance. When the flushing spaniel finds the bird, he aggressively attacks and in so doing, sets the bird awing. The dog's snapping jaws provide the incentive for the bird to get out of Dodge.

Stanley demonstrates the spaniel flushing technique.

Training in black & white

Thoughts and notes from Cathy V.

Training Notes
Fred Bradley
March 24-26, 2008


In no particular order:

• Be fair to your dog
• Don’t lie to them
• One command
• Don’t correct unless you need to
• Make sure you correct the last command you give them
• Heel – one hand on the leash
• Keep your spot – sit means sit – put them back by using a palm and put them back
• Use a small space for heeling and quartering until you and the dog can move to bigger ground
• Quiet whistle – don’t change the volume as you get excited
• On the Retrieve – the dog should go out and come back at the same speed
• 90% of blind work is done by memory work
• Dog should work in the channel you send it
• Don’t worry about anything that has happened in the past – move forward
• No Drills – too boring for spaniels
• Tell the dogs what you like and what you don’t like
• No pile work – too monotonous
• Pile work is forcing them to do it – sense of power – not fair
• Throw a bumper by the dog, pick it up
• Fairness = black and white – Keep it clear
• Decide what the issue is – is the problem you or the dog?
• Come = keep whistling at first as they are learning the recall
• Keep your dog close
• The only thing the shake a bird does is it teaches the dog to pay attention to the people shaking the bird or hat. The dog should pay attention to you
• Recall – don’t feed a meal or two – whistle, praise and reward. Hot dogs for 2 -3 weeks, then just praise, don’t bait the dog
• Use your personality
• Don’t use the recall for control – only for come
• Stand up Straight
• Sit means sit
• Cast off using one hand – palm down – no fingers. Try it with no hands
• Don’t look at the dog when you are heeling – feel where it is and correct or encourage as needed
• Only point a finger when they have done something wrong – use your finger as a correction
• Quiet Whistle
• The reward for the dog is being with you
• Make any piece of ground interesting to your dog – that is your job
• The dogs are here to please you
• How simple is dog training? Having your dog do the last thing you said – remember the last command
• Sit means sit, turn means turn, come means come
• Be critical about yourself, but move on and learn from your mistakes. Take it to the next level.

Gimmee a doggie or a Teddy bear

Or a high school banner for my wall.

A Red & White Valentine

An unexpected Valentine's day card, to be sure.

Aki found a way, an online service, to create a hardbound book of the first two years of The Red & White Project blog. The book is over 200 pages and has our training progress and our setbacks, along with the usual miscellania, minutia, and meanderings.

It is my most treasured Valentine.


The Red & White Project - - vol. I.

The dedication.

Remembrances of days afield.

The Acme 210 1/2 Spaniel Whistle

Aki and Lissen with Valentine's Day wishes

Shooting footwork

As in so many physical activities, it all begins with footwork:

There are many benefits to adopting a proper shooting stance. Understand that your stance does have an effect on how you mount the gun, so in turn, your stance does affect the fit of your gun. The correct stance sets up the body to correctly receive the gun stock for a proper mount. This will help reduce the effects of recoil. Most importantly, a correct stance will allow the body to swing freely, while minimizing the amount of head movement. An incorrect stance makes it difficult to swing the gun without dipping the shoulders and dropping the head. Head movement is a leading cause of missed shots. In the fields birds can flush or fly in any direction. The correct stance will allow you to swing the gun in harmony with the body, letting you move with the bird while minimizing head movement. So no matter which direction the bird flushes you can swing the gun smoothly on target. Remember that your stance is the foundation of your footwork, ready position, swing, and gun mount.

Tom Deck, The Orvis Guide to Gunfitting

Stay

I'm trying to reduce the number of commands in the field. Next on the list to go: "Stay."

Larsen will learn that "sit" means "sit and stay until you are invited to move." So that does away with the unnecessary and confusing "stay" command. Just "sit". Sit means stay.


Your daddy won't mind.

Strong enough to float a horseshoe

I-20 toward Atlanta

Want a refill?

Sunday at Danny's

We practiced on a cold day that got progressively clearer. It warmed up in the sunshine, as you might expect in Alabama, but remained cold under the trees.

We had a nice group, with Marilyn's Graham, Shoni's Sunny, Mary's Caden. Another group included Susan's Tatum, Betsy's Spike, Adrean's Cobbie, Coralie's Rowdy, and Roger & Kristie's new little dog (name unknown to me).

Larsen ran without a check cord, and he took off several times for fly-away birds. His recall was very good. Very good indeed. But we are working on being steady. Larsen's quartering on the first go-round was sloppy. Marilyn thought he was anticipating the game. On the second turn, it was much better. He hunted with true verve.

I will have to ask Joe DeMarkis on how to run that drill. Those long run-offs clearly did not help with steadying. I may have to retreat a step or two and just toss the birds about him and whistle him to a sit.

As I reconsidered the day, I wonder if having skipped the bird toss on our second turn was a mistake.

At day's end, I decided to do some water work with him. The others decided to head out, so we went to the pond by ourselves. We did a little landwork. I planted some very long hunt deads, with him watching me from a hupped position. He loves hunt deads and delights in showing me what a smart dog he is. He sits patiently while I head out across the way and hide the bird (in his full sight) out in the woods somewhere. When I return and send him, he takes off at full steam, finds that bird, and heads back. He is so smart.

We did a few hunt deads and then decided to do a water blind. This is, in fact, a hunt dead that crosses water. I sent him across the rivulet, and he found the bird without any direction. We then did a full-fledged pond retrieve and one more hunt dead for fun.

During this, Larsen's returns were a bit short, but this changed when I changed. It was just Larsen and me, after all, in the waning afternoon. I looked at the blue sky and felt the new chill as the sun tipped down and I relaxed. I decided just to look away from him as he came in. I let Larsen hold (but not pluck at) the retrieved bird. All was right. As you might expect where this is going, his retrieves were right to hand.

A happy end to a day when otherwise there was not a lot to show. Maybe we made some progress after all.

Larsen finds a spot in the front car seat after a tough practice.

Friday night pizza

How to untrain your dog

I could write a book.

This chapter has to do with the care and feeding of bobwhite quail, an escape, and a recapture by an eager spaniel who then manages to untrain himself with my help.

I have a few quail from last practice, and I was refreshing the cabbage, apples, water, and shredded paper that I had put into the crate. It was pretty easy for one of those birds to slip by and pop out onto the driveway. Larsen had been watching me with great interest, and he chased the bird across the drive and over the lawn before snagging it. Ok, fine, I suppose. I brought him into the back yard for a little work.

Here's where it really unwinds. Larsen went to his prancing around with the bird and would not come when whistled or called. I finally got the bird from him, and to show him that there were no hard feelings (what on earth was I thinking?) I let him fetch it again. So now we had 2x turns at parading!

I only wonder what will happen at this Sunday's practice session.

Unwitting accomplices.

Sporting Classics

Sporting Classics is a genuine 5 star publication, but it gets 4 stars on this blog meaning you don't need to subscribe to it unless you really want to (and maybe you should). The reasoning is that Sporting Classics is not squarely aimed at the upland enthusiast, although it does not ignore him or her.

This beautiful magazine features fine writing on all topics afield. It is oriented to gundogs on a seasonal basis, as the 2009 autumn cover shows.

A feathered bird, a feathered dog, and a feathered fern.

At other times, it caters to hunting big game in far-off places, as the January 2011 cover in this entry's headmast shows. One would not be inclined to ask a Welsh Springer Spaniel to flush those Cape Buffalo, even if they were eager to do it.

The recent Hemingway edition (30th anniversary collector's issue),has a beautiful photo essay of a drive shoot in Scotland. The landscape, dogs, birds, and even those breeks are what every rough hunter dreams of, at least on occasion.

The magazine is printed on heavy, bright, glossy stock that makes these pictures almost frameable right from the magazine and makes it a bit of a heft to include on an airplane trip and (maybe unfortunately) difficult to toss away once you've read it.

Sporting Classics often dips into the treasure trove of years past. That Hemingway edition also has a readable and entertaining article by the great upland writer, Nash Buckingham ("Playhouse"). The article is richly illustrated with reproductions of upland scenes in oil.

In articles and in advertisements, Sporting Classics features quite a bit of beautiful game and natural art, including this forlorn bronze quail.

A bronze quail chortles from a fencepost.

An enjoyable feature is called "Passages: Thoughtful words that will live with us forever." It is an outdoor version of "Thoughts and quotes on the business life" that you may enjoy reading in Forbes magazine. Here is a remembrance on the autumn days spent afield with your dog:

The perfection of life with a gun dog, like the perfection of an autumn, is disturbing because you know, even as it begins, that it must end. Time bestows the gift and steals it in the process. George Bird Evans, An Affair with Grouse, 1982.

Sunday steadying

On the plus side, I'm walking onto the field with a plan in mind. I have a clearer understanding of what's required of the "3-bird drill." I'm starting to understand how Larsen will react to the flush (and how I will react as well), so I'm intervening and blowing the sit whistle with greater confidence, which is to say at the right time and not necessarily with greater gusto. My timing is improving a bit.

On the negative side, I still have a long way to go to be proficient in how I address Larsen when I tell him to sit on the flush. I have to work on his sit so that he sits all the way down at the instant I tell him. I have to quietly approach him to pet him without having him start away from me. This is a surprising development and I can't figure out if he is getting the signal to go, or if he thinks I am coming to correct him. I have to remember to softly pip the sit whistle to remind him to stay steady. I have to quickly but carefully consider whether I will send him for a bird or collect the bird myself. If I send him, I have to decide whether to send him from where he sits, or call him to me and then as he arrives, command him "back" to the bird.

As for the lighter moments, did I mention our hunt dead practice?

After one successful HD, I put the bird in a different place. It turns out that new place had a covey of quail, which Larsen found on his way home with the dead bird. Any pretense of obedience was completely gone, as he tried to herd his captured quail. He couldn't figure what to do with the quail in his mouth when he came upon the others in the broom sedge. Some exploded into flight, and others scurried to deeper grass. At one point, Larsen came half way home and then put the bird down. He turned and went after another, but in full stride, reversed his course to return and make sure that the first bird was not walking about. As painful as it was to watch a weekend's worth of work unravel, it was funny to see that dog try to figure out how he was going to get all of those birds home. I shut down the commands and whistle and just walked to try to collect him.

Something to work on: have him trust me enough that I have some good plans for him and that he should come all the way home and deliver the bird to hand. Let him understand that I will then resend him.

I'm sure that in those last minutes of practice I undid the day's work, but we'll have a better idea of that at next week's practice.

Ruffled Grouse

Ruffed Grouse, not ruffled grouse.

The ruffed grouse is known as the king of gamebirds. It's about the size of a small chicken and has several different presentations (called "morphs") that are reflected in subtle differences in its coloration. In New England, ruffed grouse are sometimes (or often) called partridge (pa'tridge in Maine), although it is technically not a partridge at all. The bird lives in areas where hardwood is predominant and there is a variety of clear cutting and new growth as well as old growth provided that the canopy is not too dense and there is brush plant below (see e.g., "Habitat Suitability Index Models: Ruffed Grouse," U.S. Dept of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service, Bio Rpt 82(10.86), April 1985). The ruffed grouse is a galiform, like a chicken or a turkey, and like any galiform, it flies as a last resort, making the the use of a dog, especially a flushing dog such as a spaniel, a necessity.

The Ruffed Grouse Society pubishes a quarterly glossy dedicated not only to the grouse, but to the other galiforms. This is an old-school publication devoted to conserving not only this bird, but the heritage of upland gamebird hunting.

There is always a column on dogs and on habitat conservation and restoration. The Winter 2011 issue describes the merits of clear cutting, new growth succession, and its (positive) effects on bio-diversity. The publication has the mandatory, but very welcome, column on gear & gadgets. The Winter 2011 edition has an interesting article explaining woodcock hunting season in North America.
Not only are there beautiful and understated photographs, but the publication will often feature the pen-and-ink or watercolor efforts of a game artist.

This publication earns its 5-star rating.

Upland Almanac

Upland Almanac is another 5-star rated publication.

The UA is a relatively brief (80 pages or so), glossy publication "for the bird hunting enthusiast."

The vet's column, "The Healthy Dog," by Dr. Walt Cottrell usually selects from some interesting cases, sometimes with a twist, and sometimes straight up. Either way, Dr. Cottrell's descriptions of the cures or next steps provide a look into the thinking of a gundog's vet.

The "For the Birds" column might provide a roundup of bird reports or initiatives of conservation clubs.

There are a number of articles on gear and gadgets ("The Tailgate Review"), addressing the neverending quest to keep all of the dog's junk in some sort of order. There's also a feature on someone, some spectacular lodge, or an impossibly tasteful classic upland gun of some sort.

The ads are part of the charm. Try flipping by the ads by Ceasar Guerini or Willoughby McCabe & Co. without pause. Mull on the invitation for a trip to Park Falls Wisconsin some October week. Glance through the book mart and maybe treat yourself to a copy of Ken Roebuck's "Gun-Dog Training Spaniels and Retrievers," if for some reason you do not have it yet.

There's also a recipe column for those quail, chukar, pheasant, grouse, or woodcock that you've managed to bag.

You've heard of slow cooking, right? Well this magazine invites slow reading.

GunDog

Wonder what you should be reading now? One important resource is GunDog magazine. For GunDog, it's all about the dog. The magazine showcases a gundog breed, as well as recurring features on the health and well-being of the dogs and gundog training. The spaniel/retriever articles are written by Jim Spencer, author of Hup: Training Flushing Spaniels the American Way, a well-respected book on spaniel training. Whether you have a spaniel or a pointer, the dog training articles are insightful and provide useful reminders such as reading the dog's mood in order to press him to learn something new and possibly unpleasant (such as the hold command), or easing back to bring back the fun, at a new and better level.

There are seasonal reminders about keeping the dog cool and hydrated and watching for invasive and harmful grasses and seeds (click here if you've never heard of these).

The website for GunDog magazine has some good short training videos. Click here for a short video on steadying your dog.

There are articles on gear, gadgets, and guns.

I rate GunDog magazine 5 stars.