Nebraska 2009

Well, my first trip to Nebraska was great, a lot of fun, we didn't bring home truck loads of birds like I envisioned, but it was a successful trip anyway. It's just great to spend time in the field with family and friends watching your dog cover the terrain. There was a lot of "fruitless trudges" but that's hunting!

We hunted for 4 1/2 days and for the last 3 days we dealt with temps in the high 50's, higher temps than I would of liked to have seen. I was hoping for low 30's with some snow but maybe next year. The bird's had their track shoes on and out smarted Riley many times. They took him to school and hopefully he learned a few things.

Riley hunted well, he had a lot of false points but he made progress and I could tell he was starting to figure out old scent from fresh scent. I never did get the point and flush like I would have liked but the birds were not holding at all. He did get a taste of wild pheasant though.

Catching up.

Riley has been coming along nicely. Since the last time I posted I have worked with Riley using the bird launcher and all went as planned, eventually, he has had a very strong pointing instinct from the time I got him. He also has a very strong prey drive so getting to the point where he would let me flush the bird took some time, patience and alot of birds.

The next thing I worked on with Riley, was hold training. Hold training is basically getting your dog to hold whatever object it is told to hold until you give a release command. My release command was "give". You also want your dog to hold the object while doing the basic obedience commands. The reason for hold training is so your dog don't drop a wounded bird that could possibly run or fly off. I done all of the hold training on the ground instead of a bench. I didn't have a bench or I would have probably used one. If you don't have a bench you will need your dog to be able to sit and not move. If you don't have the foundation of obedience it will make all other training more difficult than it should be. I was thankful we spent our time on obedience. I duck hunt alot so I wanted to get this in before our first season and before Riley might get some bad habits.