We hunt as silent as possible under no condition do we use or alow whistles in the field unless to handel a dog to a downed bird. If a client has to constantly yell at his dog to keep it within gun range then it goes in the box. We've killed over 15,000 birds since 1992 and have watched far more birds than that fly away from whistles or human voices. A bird will become EXTREMELY wild after being hunted 2 or 3 times. They also are more afraid of the human voice than many other noise. I use the method of turning and "hup" when necessary I use the beeper or nick when using a collar.

As for shooting bumped birds I dont have that luxury when guiding clients. Our dogs retrieve more birds flushed by hunters than they have the chance to point. Probably not the best scenario but hey how strong is their point? If my dog cant retrieve every bird that gets shot Im out of business. I can say it has hindered one dog in nearly 20 years. He wasnt bred to be a pointing lab just happened to point. ( Boss is a sibling to Contenders Dora #2 Derby dog after Downtown Dusty Brown)

Training to range silently is done as Pat said. I often turn 90 degrees and walk away from pup to the extent of leaving him in the field if necessary. They soon learn to pay attention to where you are and how far YOUR limit is. Some dogs take a long time to figure it out, Rock caught on in three sessions at 7 mo of age. Its tough to change a dog thats been allowed to hunt differently however.

Not to say this is the way a dog should hunt in every situation just in our situation.

Redlabel...to each his own and we all are, of course, creatures of our own experience. I have no clue what noises scare pheasants most and have never seen any research on that subject. However, bells on hunting dogs are as old as the hills and certainly, millions of game birds have been harvested over dogs with bells...and more recently beeper collars. It would be my GUESS...not being an avian behaviorist...that the VERY LOUD noise of dogs crashing through cover is very spooky to pheasants. Certainly, I've seen hundreds of them in the wild, spook up out in front of a line of hunters/dogs all day at almost the exact distance...maybe 200 yards or so. So the SURELY can hear the dogs approach and they SURELY are spooked by that sound. AS noted earlier in the thread, I have been turning away from Cody...sometimes hiding behind a tree or tall bushes. And he DOES come back to look for me. But he has a GREAT nose and when he gets on scent...he could care less where I am! The ISSUE is if he is in low enough cover so I can watch him, I am FINE with letting him range out to an eventual point...HOPEFULLY! But in taller cover, I have NO CLUE where he is and he as often put birds up WAY out of range. 1. Did he point them and then bump them up? 2. Did he stay steady on point only to have the bird flush up anyway? 3. Or did he just run over it? I have no clue and am still at a loss as to how to GET a clue. Again, Cody is my first PL or pointer of any breed. But I've hunted over flushing dogs all my life and those dogs MUST HUNT CLOSE or be given to a good non-hunting family. And MILLIONS of birds have been shot over flushing dogs and there is no evidence of which I am aware that a pointing dog will produce more killable birds than a flushing dog. So I think pointing vs. flushing is a matter of personal preference AND where labs are concerned, a desire to hunt waterfowl as well as upland game. I don't see many GSPs busting ice to retrieve green heads! So, I'm going to get Cody on as many birds as I possibly can this season and see how much he teaches himself on the pointing side....and I think that pointing is REALLY COOL! But if he runs off on scent and flushes too many birds out of range, then he is going to become a CLOSE HUNTING DOG just like the others I've hunted over for 50 years and if he gets an occasional point in shorter cover GREAT! I will cherish every single one! (-: Jim

Posted By av84fun on 01 Dec 2011 05:36 PM
... But if he runs off on scent and flushes too many birds out of range, ... (-: Jim

Jim, If you develop his manners on birds using a system which essentially bases all manners on birds on a perfectly developed "stop to wild flush" response (my favorite is the West system I've written extensively about), you will have a technique at your command to deal with the situation you fear and he will learn not to purposefully flush birds out of range.

You may find the result more satisfying than continually hacking him into ESS range and walking five or ten times as far as necessary to find all the birds you want.

Good luck

Jere

Jere....West System. I WILL search on your posts and read up on it.



Just got back from hunting fez in Oregon this morning with 2 buddies and their dogs. We got into SUPER HEAVY chest high grassy weed cover. I saw Cody about twice in a 400 yard push through that field. I bagged my first Oregon ringneck but have no clue if it just spooked up or was flushed by one of the dogs.


Then, I fell and slammed my knee cap on a rock. It's now swollen up to about a third bigger than it should be. So I'm sitting here with a bag of frozen peas taped to my knee!! Had to quit hunting so the one fez cost me $67 (for out of state licenses)!!! But I'd do it again tomorrow....IF I COULD WALK!!!

One of my pal's "pointerpoos" got 3 points in FOOT HIGH grass! But I was back in the truck with Cody so didn't get the pleasure of seeing them.


(-:

(-:

Sorry about that knee - just hope it just got jarred - no broken patella or torn miniscus or worse!

The truth is all of us who love pointing dogs have to understand the fundamental fact that hunting in that sort of cover is for a different mode of bird finding/moving as are dense cattail sloughs, tall switchgrass etc. Two tractors with a long chain between them work great, don't need any training and eat only when they are used. That's a very close working flushing dog venue for sure.

Personally, I get as much or more enjoyment out of watching the dogs work the cover, wind etc and get to bird pinned down as I do out of seeing a bird drop from the sky when I shoot so I tend to try and avoid hunting that real thick stuff. My only concession is up here where the willow and alder thickets are thick but not so expansive I do get to watch the dog work until after it digs into the thickets - that's when a beeper or preferably an ASTRO comes into play. But I don't really like that. The birds do what the birds do though and the dog does what it needs to do too.

Jere

I hear ya about the joys of actually watching my dogs hunt and staying out of the REALLY dense stuff. But we didn't realize what we were getting into until we got into it. The cover looked to be tall cane-like shoots that looked to be even easier to navigate than standing corn.


But when we got INTO it, there was DENSE grass...so dense that it had already caved in and was lying in DENSE thickets with the "grain" lying toward us...which made it VERY difficult to get through.


Next time, I will leave my ego in the truck and do a 180 whenever I get into stuff that is THAT thick!


(-:

Re: the West System...I've read up some on it but as you know, it relies in important PART on the use of pigeons (preferably wild caught ones) and/or other small birds that are carded etc. But the point being that conditioning the dog to stand firm at the flush in a highly controlled and often repeated training sequence just isn't practical for me and for many others who just don't have access to the birds or the grounds to shoot them on.


So, I guess I'll just have to let him learn in my frequent wild and preserve hunting sessions.


Having said that, there is an excellent trainer not far from me who I could book some "dual" time with and maybe get into the exact "West System" techniques that I've just read up on. Doing so would be far more expensive than the do-it-yourself method....but oh well!!!



Finally, I don't mean to demean Cody in any way. He has a LOT of points to his credit in this, his first hunting season...marks like a laser bea... is VERY bold and is about as birdy as a dog can get. And he'll get on a LOT more birds before the regular season ends and into the preserve season through March. What I AM going to do is stay as much as humanly possible into more manageable cover on the wild hunts and IDEAL cover on the preserves so HE gets the odds in HIS favor during this critical time of his career. (-:

Jim

Posted By av84fun on 05 Dec 2011 10:14 PM
... Re: the West System...I've read up some on it but as you know, it relies in important PART on the use of pigeons (preferably wild caught ones) and/or other small birds that are carded etc. But the point being that conditioning the dog to stand firm at the flush in a highly controlled and often repeated training sequence just isn't practical for me and for many others who just don't have access to the birds or the grounds to shoot them on.


So, I guess I'll just have to let him learn in my frequent wild and preserve hunting sessions.


Having said that, there is an excellent trainer not far from me who I could book some "dual" time with and maybe get into the exact "West System" techniques that I've just read up on. Doing so would be far more expensive than the do-it-yourself method....but oh well!!!

... Jim

Jim, Before I met and worked with Bill Gibbons to learn the "right way," all I had to go on was the early Bill West video (mis) titled "Training Labradors to Point" or some such.

I watched it over and over, turned off the audio and watched some more. Pretty much got it figured out that-a-way.

I started my dogs on lead, flat collar, walking around the perimeter and in the surrounding cover of a little airport a friend in AZ lived winters on at the time.

(This was after they had several weeks running on wild desert quail and had begun to point on their own; my knee, which had been recently repaired, went south on me; and I had to rest through the end of the hunting season when I had hoped to finish them "au naturel" as you're trying.)

I trained them to stop and stand still when they felt the silent cue of several rapid upward tugs of the lead, to allow me to walk around them w/o breaking, to kick brush in front etc. Then I went to carded pigeons which were more food for overwintering hawks in the area than a training tool. Only then did I hook up with Bill G in Phoenix and spend several weeks learning it his way.

But, for several reasons, none all that valid, I didn't finish the dogs then and there with the full transition through pen raised quail etc. Bill begged us to stay, "They'll be finished in a few more weeks" he said. But, foolishly, I went home and found out how little actually passed on to wild birds like chukars in Oregon the next fall or whenever it was we got south again. The dogs were working and locating birds ok but mostly pressured them too much and up they went. I called Bill and told him what was going on. He asked: "You can stop them with the ec can't you?" I lied: "Yes," and he replied, "Then as soon as they put the bird up stop them with the ec. Soon they'll start pointing because its their only other choice."

They had not even been properly conditioned to the ec at the time but I knew what I had to do and did it using the ec at the lowest level the dog showed any reaction to just as I had the check cord and followed his directions for the rest of the season. (Actually, one of the dogs had experienced a freak incident where the ec discharged from a taxi radio or some other fluke and really wouldn't take any ec at all. I took him to a spot near where we were camped and was pretty sure he'd find a covey of chukars. Soon he did, crowded them as expected and the instant they flew I tapped him with the lowest level the device had. He screeched to a halt, head high, tail high and watched them disappear over a nearby rise. We then followed and worked a single or two. He was OK with the ec from then on.)

In the early spring on the way home from AZ we found a place in OR where the chukars had staked out their nesting territories but had not actually started nesting yet. There were several pairs of birds arranged there about 1/4 mile apart on an almost perfect checkerboard grid. We worked those birds for a week or ten days with the same protocol - If the birds flew and in my estimation they should have been pointed and held, the dog was stopped with the ec. There were some freebies when I deemed it unfair to tap the dog when he was trying.

By the time we left both dogs were pointing essentially all the birds they found but their "hunt" had degenerated as they had memorized just about exactly where to go to find the next pair of birds!

I would do the same on running pheasants, but one has to be able to see what's going on between the dog and bird if he's gonna use the ec when the dog is on birds and this is probably more difficult in typical pheasant habitat than the somewhat scattered sage flat the chukars were in.

Martha Greenlee's book "Training with Mo" describes Mo Lindley's (another Bill West protegé who works out of Piedmont, SC and has worked with a fair number of PLs on this stuff) adaptation of the method to using remote launchers. Mo has moved on to mostly using the Higgin's releasers now if I understand correctly. The overall process is the same though.

Where do you live that you can't find any place suitable to work dogs (five acres of treeless not too thick cover will work if that's all you can have. Patchy cover like typical sage or other desert works real well with pigeons. they have no difficulty launching themselves and seem to sidle up to a bush rather than standing out in the open for all the world to see.)? And can't get any birds? Barn pigeons are available most everywhere and there are homing pigeon fans all over if you search. They almost always have some culls they'll give away. In some ways homers are preferable to wild pigeons if you don't tame them - you may not want to shoot them but you don't have to kill very many birds for the dog - the pointing dog folks kill very few after initial introduction. Carded birds do get hung up in trees but homers just fly back to their home loft.

Anyway, I did it all wrong, mostly on wild birds, and it worked out OK for us.

Good luck,

Jere

Jere....THANKS for the INTERESTING comments. About land to work on it's not the acreage so much as acreage upon which I can SHOOT....legally. There is also the time to get there. Given the expense of the launcher (Higgins plus remote is a few hundred bucks) I can book several hours of time with a PRO and avoid all the mistakes in technique that I would surly commit.


I understand the process and have used some semblance of it to "de-chase" Cody on wild fez at a local state park that tolerates off leash dogs. He will lurch a bit on the flush but then pretty much stops to watch. But I can't SHOOT there so he really doesn't get the ultimate "reward" of whoaing properly and then getting a retrieve.


So, for me...going the Pro route is by far the best option.


Now I'm going to sound like the insufferable "proud parent"...but so far...

a judge at Cody's first JH event called me aside and said..."Do you realize how talented your dog is?"


His breeder/trainer offered to buy him back.


A hunting guide with a string of pointers with many thousands of points to their credit offered to buy him.


So, I actually do think that I have an exceptional dog on my hands and want him to be the best HE can be without too much flopping around from me. So, I will always default to the "pro option" without much encouragement!


Best,
Jim

Jim, I wouldn't pass up any opportunities to work with him on those aspects of "manners" which do not require birds any time/place it is feasible. Dogs have been trained in city parks this way.

Of course there are lots of "its better tos" like having a whole parade of dogs each being worked one behind another and having bird encounters in sequence with "my" dog, after being drilled on stop to cue, stop to flush, stop to shot, stop to dog pointing/standing, finally getting to work a bird and having it shot and getting the retrieve. I know you will probably not be able to arrange that scenario but it really IS effective.

You CAN do much of the lead work and transition to ec cue w/o birds. Its just better to have some birds flushing here and there (they do not have to be pigeons or game birds for that matter.) The releaser must be a nice device - I haven't built one yet myself, but for a single bird scenario, it can be semi simulated by planting a pigeon hard so it hits the ground with a thump and is stunned a bit and left there. It doesn't have to be carded. It might leave before you get back with the dog having waited for scent to disperse but that's life. And let me stress the value of simulating a wild flush where the bird is worked from upwind, the dog does not smell the bird and the flush is a surprise. You would not want to kill this bird, but you should want the dog to stop and stand in its tracks when that bird flushes. ( I actually had a flushing dog guy of long experience ask me how I got Storm to do that very thing when one of the big running SD roosters took flight when the dog within 50 yards of him.)

I do think it is better NOT to kill a bunch of birds in this process. The retrieving work comes separately mostly and you don't want the dog to expect a dead bird every time it encounters one.

I'm just throwing out some ideas about ways you might get some inexpensive effective training on the dog considering the situations you have to work with.

have fun,

Jere

THANKS Jere. I have two places to go where I can get fez up every other day or so...in the time I have available to try...but cannot SHOOT at those places.

The are wild birds and even in moderate cover they almost always spook up before we get in reasonable gun range. So Cody's "pointing opportunities" so far have mostly been on preserves on pen raised birds.


He's pretty good at not chasing the birds that flush...maybe he moves a few steps then stops. But I infer from your comments that you don't think giving him that kind of exposure is a bad idea. Right??


Also, since he understands the "whoa" command, do you think any useful purpose is served by my throwing bumpers when he is not near me and giving him the whoa command and/or a mild collar bump if he moves to get it? Would that practice tend to reinforce the "hold still upon flush" behavior????


THANKS!

Jim