Playing the Pigeon Wild Card!

The plain and simple truth is that YOU cannot teach your pup to hunt and point birds. Those behaviors have to be talents the dog is born with. (and the more, the better. See: “Why Field Trials?”) Moreover, only THE BIRDS can teach your new hunting partner to perfect those talents.

Ok, so we need birds to do this. Well, too bad most of us live is suburbia with our dogs. Most of us don’t have access or the means to get our young charges on enough wild birds during the off-season to properly bring the dog’s skill level up to a usable point to put birds in the bag once hunting season gets here. Once we have started to work the pup on a few planted birds in summer trainig we rapidly reach a treacherous point in the dog’s development where training this way will not continue to improve our hunting dog and in fact, may do harm and create bad habits that will taking longer to undo than properly training the dog would’ve taken in the first place. So, what are we left with?

You do NOT want to wait all summer and then be training during hunting season. You don’t get to shoot too many pheasants that way. So most of us resort to some sort of a “captive bird substitute” to insure that our young dog gets enough bird contact in training.

The problem is that captive birds, even the very best, are a barely passable substitute for the real deal. As trainers, we compound the problem with our neat little bag of tricks that we think will help the dog learn to hunt and point, but that really just teach bad habits and counter-productive behavior on real, wild birds.

We sleep the birds into cover, clip wing feathers, hide them in launchers, tie them to fishing poles and any number of other things that are designed to make sure that when Buster goes afield there will be a bird there for him to find. Most of things things will accomplish that goal, however, the situation that we are thus teaching the dog to hunt, find and point is not the type of thing that leads to productive, stylish bird work once the fall hunting season opens.

The fact simply is this: Dogs hunt birds better when the birds act like they are wild birds, i.e. the birds are strong healthy specimens capable of hard flushes and escape flight, there is no human scent on the birds or the surrounding area to be hunted and finally and maybe most important; the birds must act like they know they are being hunted at all times.

So, if we don’t have access to alot of wild birds for training, what then?

All of the things we usually do to “plant birds” for training render the bird pretty much unaware of it’s surroundings and leave man-scent all over the place to confuse the dog. We bring our dog in, it scents the bird, wanders over, picks it up and brings it to us with a look of “Uh, hey, knothead, here’s the sick bird you dropped over there…!!”

And then we are left wondering “what is wrong with our dog…???”
It’s not the dog…it’s YOU!!

In these piece I will give you a method that I have seen described in writing and video that will enable those of us that can’t regularly get our dogs on wild birds to more accurately simulate wild birds in training. I have used this method with much sucess on a number of young dogs over the last 15 years.

Make no mistake, planted birds, launchers, pigeon poles etc. all have a useful place in bird dog training when used properly. However, when you reach the point in the dog’s development when you are really ready to let go of the reigns a bit and have the dog start to learn to hunt, find and point birds on his own for you, your stumbling about hiding sleeping pigeons in the bushes out in the back yard is not going to get it done.