00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how to get your hunting dog on as many birds as possible this season. This one is a fun topic for me because if there's one thing I like to do, it's to figure out hunting opportunities over on the white tail side. That's kind of my bread and butter. But it doesn't end with deer In an awful lot of places. We're real lucky to have multiple game bird species to hunt, which often live on public land, and if we don't, we can get somewhere that usually has them. This is so important to the development of a gun dog, and it's what I'm going to talk about right now. A few weeks back, my twin daughters asked if they could bring a friend up to our lake cabin. This is a pretty common request considering they are thirteen, and it can go a few different ways depend on the friend. But luckily the girl they invited up is one who we've coached in sports since they were in second grade, and we know her and her family well. She's a sweet kid who, by the reports I got from her parents, loves to fish, which was perfect because as. 00:01:14 Speaker 2: A family, we love to fish. 00:01:17 Speaker 1: So I took one of my daughters and this girl out the first day we were up at the lake, and I handed her a spinning rod with a swimming jig on it because she had already told me she knew how to cast, so I figured we're good to go. I then watched as she held the rod upside down and made a cast that sounded a little like she had chucked a pretty good sized rock into the water about four feet from our boat. It turns out her family as more of the sit on the pontoon with spin cast type of setups and fish for sunfish with bobbers and worms. We are the kind of family that throws lures all day long to try to catch bass and northerns. So I gave her a quick tutorial on how to cast and watch as she figured it out. What she didn't figure out, because you can't coach someone through it is how to set the hook and how to fight fish. You can call only explain to a newb angler how to cast. And I have so much that I can hear a cast happen in my boat and know whether the castor pulled her finger off the line too early or too late during the arc the rod swing. You can explain to someone how fast or slow to reel if there is any action they should impart with the rod and a whole bunch of stuff. But what you can't do is explain to someone you know, like where they're going to clearly understand how to set the hook well and then how to fight a fish, at least when it comes to twenty inch smallies or decent sized northerns or large mouth living up in the slop and looking to gobble up a fake kermit as he hops across the lily pads on his way to miss Piggy's place. You just have to get in the reps. And when it comes to this skill in the outdoors, there's just no way around it. You have to set the hook and lose fish because of it, and you have to fight fish and lose them. It's a feel thing, an instinct thing. So in other words, it's not just academic, no matter how hard we try to make it out to be. You can't stand in the yard and work on these when you're not. 00:03:01 Speaker 2: In the boat. 00:03:02 Speaker 1: This, in so many ways is like what happens with bird dogs and well actual real live birds. 00:03:11 Speaker 2: Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking. I know two things a lot of you are thinking. Actually. 00:03:15 Speaker 1: The first is that you can get fighto exposure to birds through a trainer who has a bunch of pigeons or maybe farm raised mallards or pheasants or chuckers. The second is that you don't have access too much for wild birds in your county or your state, or your region or whatever. So let's back up first to the not wild bird part of the equation first. Whether you do it yourself or you're hire it out to a pro live bird exposure in a controlled situation with not wild birds is a great idea. A young bird dog getting the right intro into a pigeons or you know, a sleeved up mallard or whatever is a great way to hype a dog up without almost any risk of something going bad. 00:03:54 Speaker 2: That's not a bad thing and it never will be. 00:03:56 Speaker 1: I don't think this stage of this development process, which will come after wings and scent and not live birds. 00:04:02 Speaker 2: Is great. It's important. 00:04:05 Speaker 1: It's a piece of the puzzle that will help a bird dog get to the right place to be good with bird encounters. But isn't the end of the journey. You could expose your dogs through training to tame pigeons and pheasants and mallards and whatever else a million times, but that wouldn't necessarily make your dog a really good hunter. Now, before you fire off angry emails, I'll say this, it definitely wouldn't hurt your dog if you did it right either. But eventually, after gunfire intro, you need to get your dog out to find some birds and point them or flush them and hopefully retrieve them all in a variety of environments, which brings me to the second point I brought up earlier. If some of you don't think you have access to enough wild birds to really develop a dog without a game farm type of situation, again, taking your dog to where the pen raised roosters are and having them plant it out in the field isn't a bad idea. It's a good one for an awful lot of folks. 00:04:56 Speaker 2: Now. 00:04:56 Speaker 1: I know some people want to make it seem like those birds are close enough to wild birds that it really doesn't matter. 00:05:01 Speaker 2: But those people are. 00:05:02 Speaker 1: Wrong, And that's okay because those pen raised roosters, many of which are a little dizzy from getting spun up in a burlap sack are another good stepping stone, especially for folks who really don't have tons of opportunities to hunt wild birds. Plus, those situations are heavily controlled, which means you can solve for any of the variables that might trip your pup up before you ever load the shotgun. Your dog won't know the difference. And being able to predict where half of a dozen pheasants are in a small field and then work them and shoot them it's not a bad thing. It's a great preseason or postseason option too. It's also not going to fully prepare your dog for wild birds and wild places. For that, they have to go into those wild places with you and find those wild birds and figure out the whole thing largely on their own. This is the point where a lot of bird dog owners hit the wall and can't quite figure out what to do. This is also what happened to me when I got married and, like an absolute moron, moved to the suburbs of the Twin Cities. Now, I'm not saying everyone who lives here or in similar areas as a moron, but instead that a guy like me doesn't belong around four million other people. I felt that pretty quickly after relocating, first on the fishing front, and then as I took my young golden retriever out to hunt the fall, I had no idea how to find some land to hunt and what to hunt for. I knew that finding roosters and grouse anywhere near my house was probably a lost cause, and I was a bummer because roosters and grouse are my favorite birds to hunt. I hadn't really hunted doves much at that time because us near Canadians had only recently started getting dove seasons, which probably sounds crazy to a lot of you Southern listeners. I also didn't duck hunt at the time because duck season and deer season don't play well together. And I felt at the time and still do a little bit today, that it's hard to give yourself to both in the way that you need to. In my mind, you were either a duck hunter or a bowhunter, but not both. But being a bow hunter in a place with nowhere to haunt put me on a lot of pieces of public land where I live. That means you're also on land with water, because this is the land of ten thousand lakes and fifty million swamps and slews and small ponds. So I started seeing a hell of a lot of teal and wood ducks, which got me thinking. Then that first season, you know, while sitting on tree stands and listening to the distant drone of rush hour traffic, I saw a hell of a lot of woodcock flying around. Now, ducks and woodcock aren't my dream birds, but it made me realize something. Migrators seemed to have no clue that they were landing on public ground in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. That first season, Mike Golden and I stumbled across enough wild birds to help her start to figure out the flushing side of things and the sit and weight side of things that comes with ducks as well. I also noticed something else. Some of the duck ponds I scouted, or some of the places where the woodcock seemed to roost, were close to dead trees that doves liked to land in. That brought my hountmal bird options up a little bit higher. But more importantly, it gave us a chance to hunt several types of birds close to my house and not a couple of hours away, like the grouse and pheasants that I wanted to hunt. But what does this mean to you? Well, i'll tell you. When I moved to the Cities, I was not doing well. I started a job I hated, which involved a twelve mile commute that took over an hour each way. I never got two days off in a row because of the nature of the business I worked for. It was torture for real. I was depressed as hell, drinking way too much and looking at my bird dog like, well, buddy, I'm sorry I brought you here too. My attitude sucked, and it was partially because I had convinced myself that I had nothing to hunt near my house. Then, by accident and then by intention, I started to piece together a few opportunities that barely resemble what I actually wanted to do. But life isn't always great at delivering exactly what you want. If you get my drift, That's why Margot Robbie never responds to Cal's DMS, no matter how many he sends. But you know what, I had a hell of a lot of fun learning how to be a small water duck hunter. With Mike Golden. We shot quite a few wood ducks and some teal, and we ended up with a few mallards as well. When the weather turned and the green head started showing up from Canada, we killed quite a few woodcock and eventually a hell of a lot of doves. Now, that dog was never going to be a great bird dog because she didn't have the blood, but she was good enough for me at the time, and she brought me a lot of birds over the years, a lot of birds in places that I originally thought didn't have a lot of birds. Now, of course, I took her over to the north woods Wisconsin, where we mostly messed with rough grouse, but also to western Minnesota and a couple other prairie heavy states where the wild roosters roam. But those trips were infrequent, and there was always this sense of pressure hanging over my head when we did go, because I knew how limited our time was. That dog, at that time of my life made me a duck hunter, albeit not a very serious or good one. She also opened my eyes to woodcock and doves, which I started every pup on. 00:10:16 Speaker 2: Since it wasn't that. 00:10:18 Speaker 1: I was around enough birds to develop a bird dog, it's that I thought I wasn't. There's something here that I hear from people. Often they'll say something like, well, we don't have the grouse for quail or pheasants or whatever like we used to. This is often followed by so we go to South Dakota every year for the opener and that's our bird hunt. Or we go to the deershack and mess with the grouse once or twice a season. Maybe it's a pay by day quail hunt on a southern plantation. Look you do, you boo. I'm not trying to convince everyone listening to start duck hunting or go after a bunch of swamp dwelling worm meters when they don't want to. But if you have a good bird dog and you want that dog to be good, and you want your time with that dog to be good, then opening up your aperture a little is well good. Sure to do what you want to might require a road trip and all that entails. Do that because you generally won't regret it. But what about those closer to home opportunities. There's probably something you can get to within an hour or two of your house that might put you and your dog on some birds, and at the very least we'll get you out and trying to find them with your dog. The easiest way to do this is to consider all of your options. Your state, or your region or whatever probably offers up at least a few in any given season. If that's doves great, You can scout doves almost easier than any other bird, and they are highly patternable. They sit on power lines and dead trees, around ponds, and if you've never had a bunch of them work into a spinner on a water hole, then you might not understand what dove hunting can be like. The traditional pass shooting setup isn't anything to sneeze at either. Doves are great birds for learning steadiness and who don't have a pile. 00:12:07 Speaker 2: Of retrieves under their belt. 00:12:09 Speaker 1: Wounded doves aren't known for scratching at dogs, noses are pecking eyeballs, and they don't do a lot of running. Maybe where you live the woodcock migrate through. This is far more common than a lot of people think, and woodcock can be a hell of a lot of fun to hunt. They are perfect for yon dogs too. They generally don't run, although they kind of can. They often fly a short distance and then landing in, which is the ideal setup to bring an inexperienced dog into. They're the most challenging birds to hit either. Now, maybe you're a hardcore upland hunter, but you have to settle for some pond ducts. Again, some birds are highly scutable and don't require any calling or decoys, although both make the whole thing more fun. You can pull up on X find some public with some small water on it, and then go look at it in person. It's pretty simple and can provide some wing shooting and good dog work. Maybe you think you don't have grouse or quail or roosters around you, or even in your home state. I hear this a lot here in Minnesota, where hunters say the good old days are just gone. The crazy thing about this is that, of course we have plenty of grouse, but our pheasant numbers are really good too. The western half of the state is full of wild roosters and tons of public land, and I was coming on strong again for roosters, And of course you have that whole band of the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas to think about it. There are also quail and prairie chickens and sharptails to mess with in some of those states. And while I know everyone says there are no bob whites out there anymore, they're wrong. I'm going to go hunt them this fall with my lab on public land, and I bet we don't blank. The key to this stuff is to forget what you think you know a lot of times, or forget what most hunters like to say. Most hunters really don't know what they are talking about on a lot of this stuff. There are wild birds out there, and they come in a variety of different species, and they live in all kinds of different habitats. You know, they require due diligence to find and often some effort to scout, and definitely some effort to actually hunt. But you can start that research now. This is a great idea in general, but also a huge benefit to folks who take their dogs on just one big trip a year. Instead of having the dog show up and be out of his mind because he finally gets to hunt, you can try to find those close to home opportunities, you know, the bite sized after work for a few hours kind of hunts that allow for some kind of bird exposure. This is how you develop a bird dog into something that is comfortable out there, who also doesn't lose his head when he finally gets into the field because it's not his first hunt of the year and it won't be his last. And if you stack up a few seasons like this with the off season training to anchor the whole thing, and you'll just have that almost autopilot dog for the rest of your time with him. That place is one that is just special to get and it's something that snowballs so well because if you have a dog that just figures out how to hunt woodcock or ducks or something else, it just sets the stage to go mess with more birds and fine cool opportunities. It might just convince you to load up that GSP you head down to quail country or do the Western road trip for prairie chickens or sharp tails that you and your buddies always talk about when you're sipping long necks in the driveway in August and grill and some hot dogs and hamburgers. I want you to think about this, because there are a lot of opportunities out there. We sort of close ourselves off to them. But the more time we spend in the field with our dogs doing what our dogs are bred to do. The better they get, the better we get with working with them, and just the whole relationship between us and them levels up. Plus they just become so much better at their jobs. I want you to think about that as we inch closer to the season. I want you to come back in two weeks because I'm going to talk about early season hunting dangers and how to prepare for them. 00:16:02 Speaker 2: That's it. 00:16:03 Speaker 1: I'm Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation's podcast. As I always, thank you so much for listening and for all your support. I can't tell you how much it means to Cal and I and the rest of the crew that you guys show up and you're so loyal. You really really consume a lot of the content we create, which is awesome. Now, if you're missing something in your life, maybe you need some podcasts to listen to for that road trip I'm talking about. Maybe just want a new recipe, Maybe you want to read some articles. 00:16:28 Speaker 2: Whatever. 00:16:29 Speaker 1: We drop new content almost every day at the meat eater dot com. Head on over there check it out, and thanks again for all your support.