Prologue
One of my first experiences of hunting with a dog came during my first duck season a number of years ago. I was hunting an eddy on some public land with plenty of other hunters camped out along the length of the rest of the creek. After a successful hunt, I decided to stay after most of the other hunters had left, because I knew that I was the only hunter with a dog and I wanted to walk the banks to see if anyone had overlooked any wounded birds.
Kadie, my black lab, and I waded across the creek where I suspected there might be a bird tucked away. Once on the other side, I grabbed my whistle and gave her the hunt command. She immediately started working the thick, briar laden bank with her nose glued to the ground. A few minutes later, and a little to my own surprise, she came bounding back with a cripled hen woodie in her mouth. I left that hunt feeling good about the fact that we were able to recover an otherwise forgotten cripple and cemented my belief in the importance of training a dog to search for wounded birds.
Facts on facts on facts
Every year 3.5 million waterfowl are lost and never recovered by hunters. Pheasant populations are estimated to suffer a surplus of 10-35% loss due to unrecovered crippled birds. Those numbers are staggering when you realize how easy it is to teach a dog to hunt for crippled birds. Having a dog that can use its nose and work an area for downed game is vital and should be a priority for every bird hunter.
Round 1
To begin teaching the hunt command, take some kibble to a spot in your yard and drop one piece at a time while your dog is watching you. Take your dog to that spot and get it to put its nose to the ground and start working to find the pieces. As your dog is searching for its reward, overlay the audio cue that you wish to use. This could be a vocal cue, the most popular of which are “Hunt dead/Loss/There”, or use a whistle cadence of your choice. I personally do a whistle cadence of a quick staccato note followed by a long drawn out note.
After having success with the kibble over a couple of days, transition to hiding tennis balls in the yard. The same principles from above apply here, except that this time your dog should not see you hide the tennis balls. Start in short grass and try to keep all of this work in the same location of your yard. Once your dog has figured this out, start hiding tennis balls in thicker, taller grass/cover.
Adding complexity
Once your dog is successful finding the tennis balls, it is now time to teach him to hold, or stay, within a small area to search. We have a few options to teach a dog how to hold an area. The first is to purchase some snow fencing and stakes and create a crescent moon shape around the area that we want the dog to work in. The second option is to cut the grass surrounding your hunt area as short as possible so that the dog learns it must stay in the thick stuff to find its reward. Building these “barriers” is paramount to helping the dog learn to stay within an area and not run amok at its own whim.
Repeat the steps from the first section, hiding tennis balls and then sending your dog to search for them. If your dog strays from the area, simply stop them with your whistle and cast them back into the correct area and repeat your hunt command. In a future post we will discuss taking this training and using it in a more realistic setting, but for now, the above outline will increase your dog’s proficiency at finding lost birds.
Recap
Losing a crippled bird sucks and is something that we as sportsmen should prevent at all costs. It is our responsibility to put forth the greatest possible effort to try and find any game that we may have shot. Start switching your mindset from bragging about the number of retrieves your dog made last season, to boasting about the number of birds you didn’t lose. Follow the outline above for a month before the season starts and see the difference this skill can make on your ability to recover shot game. Tag @honeybrookkennels throughout your training journey and help us raise awareness to the importance of using dogs as a conservation tool.
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