The geese didn’t leave their dinner table before sunset last night.  So Reacher and I had to content ourselves with the amazing audio impact alone.  And it was amazing!  There were, literally, thousands of birds clamoring, doing what geese do, in their remarkably communal way.  It was noisy, and wild!  But no shots.

Other evenings and we typically get three or five shooting opportunities.  Birds can fly over with a tail wind and present wonderfully challenging swing through shots.  And every now and then a bird tumbles, and my sizable, 48 pound Brittany gets to show off his physical prowess and retrieve a twelve pound bird!  Whether it’s his favorite pheasant or sharptail, or a mallard or goose, the pup is beginning to get that he is a working dog.  Eighteen months old now, a rambunctious adolescent, but coming along!

We are keeping water open on Fish Fry Lake too.  This means that Ringneck ducks and Mallards are likely to seriously contribute to our hunt once solid ice-up actually happens…if ever.  This climate change thing is messing with us, here, now, in late December.  And as table fare, the Ringneck are awesome, right up there with the best Mallard.  Among the divers, the Ringneck is my personal dining favorite!  Canvasback come in as a close second!  My sense is that the aquatic vegetation available on our lake, Fish Fry Lake, is part of the explanation for their exquisite flavor.  It may be the Chara, or the Northern Milfoil, both native forms of aquatic vegetation, but the ducks find it, and very much relish it.  No hint of “fish”!

Mixed bag hunting is the ultimate paleo pastime, in my opinion.  I think Reacher agrees with me!

Today I had the great pleasure of hunting my eighteen month old Brittany, Reacher, until he was actually showing some signs of tiredness!  This is a first!  The dog wants to range and crash through premier pheasant cover a quarter mile ahead of me, normally.  But today he actually didn’t wear out the electrical charge on his collar…although I did recharge the unit midday!

Here’s the story:  three non-experienced hunters and one experienced with a black lab, but the lab was not oriented around pheasants.  Instead of flushing, the lab was focussed on retrieval.  Nothing unusual about this.  Training labs to be effective pheasant hunters, to charge through dense pheasant holding cover within shotgun range, is not a simple task.  It takes a lot of work, and a lot of “pheasant” experience.  ​

​But this was what we started with.  And the group was young and fit, which really helped!  They all had shotgun experience, but two were shooting borrowed guns.  Not so good!  Over the course of the day, I expect they shot nearly four boxes of shells at birds!  

From their perspective the hunt was wonderful.  Lots of action, and some birds.  Reacher loved it!  He had at least four birds shot directly over his points, and another four or five that were early birds that didn’t quite hold solid as hunters approached.  Pheasant are that way.  The birds occasionally hold tight, but just as often blow out early!  We were all watching for those moments when the cattails would stop vibrating!  Then quickly moving in to be within a shot opportunity!

The group collected eleven roosters, and one inadvertent hen, over the course of the seven hour hunt.  Two late season greenwing teal were an unexpected bonus.  The plumage on the drake teal was almost startling!  It’s early December, and teal are normally long gone by now this far north!  I remember a mid-December drake wood duck from a few years back…but that’s another story.  

So this group initiated three new hunters into the enigma of the pheasant hunt.  These guys were blooded.  I remember it taking five minutes for one of the newbies to figure out how to pick up and carry a downed bird.  It was his first, and there’s so much misinformation out there that he is excused!  Reality…the urban experience just does not prepare one for the life of a hunter.  Not today!  But the hunt itself came off well.  Safety was at the fore front.  Guns were up, for the most part.   Shots were deferred, as needed in some settings.  The hunters themselves were both, willing and receptive to input.  

Reacher shone.  He had a couple flat out “classic” points.  I doubt whether the newbies appreciated this fully, but I’m sure they will repeat the images in their “mind’s eye” many times, and remember just what hunting behind the quintessential pheasant dog is all about.  

I’m incredibly grateful that this group had the firepower to down several of the birds that Reacher pointed.  This resulted in “bird in the mouth” for Reacher.  A terrific “home run” for him!  He also learned that “bird in the mouth” is not a given…he has to do his part and “hold tight”, when he can.  The alternative is a rooster flushing a hundred yards ahead of the guns.  But he’s actually getting it, looping ahead of “runners" and getting in their space, on the other side of the guns.  Blocking them, forcing the birds to either “hide” or “fly”.  Reacher is beginning to pattern birds.  It’s a marvel!

So here we are in November enjoying an extended holiday weekend.  Anne and I chose to start off with labs for the first morning hunt.  The canine patrol included our seasoned matriarch, Vio, and her nephew, Rimu, an eight month old prodigy that Anne is training, with support from me.   Anne really emphasizes a “positive” reinforcement angle.  Yes, there are times when this process seems cumbersome and slow, but then, always, in hindsight it truly is working.  Rimu is extremely good-natured, but also highly motivated.  Rimu is performing at a terrific level for a puppy, without any doubt!  He needs a bit of work when it comes to retrieving 12 pound geese from the river up a 105 foot embankment, but pheasants?  No problem!  That day we hunted for two hours and collected four roosters.  Vio was the hero of the moment, and kept our recovery ratio in the perfect zone.  Truly, labs are an all around, multi-purpose breed that performs at all levels!

Two days later we took my high energy, wide ranging Brittany out for a pointer experience.  Reacher, named after “Jack”, was supported by Vio too.  So we had retriever backup for 18 month old Reacher.  

He didn’t need it.  In fact, noses of young dogs seem incredibly perceptive!  With both Reacher, and Rimu, the pups picked up on birds from as far away as thirty yards!

Rimu demonstrated this by shifting from one side of our spiral canal to the other, my side, with his nose up and bounding high in the air to keep with the hint of scent he had picked up on.  He worked my side for less than a minute, then flushed a long tailed rooster with twenty yards of me.  I had to swing back, behind me, and the twenty mile an hour wind gave the bird even more speed, but it tumbled!  Vio and Rimu worked the retrieve.  I also had marked the bird.  Moments later Vio figured it out, and the DOA bird was in hand.

Over the course of Reacher’s morning hunt we witnessed one of the special capabilities of fast pointers.  There were, at least, three episodes where Reacher was pointing a bird, but the bird shifted.  It ran.  At one point I glimpsed a rooster dashing through a pin cherry thicket only thirty feet from where I stood.  Just caught flickers of motion as the bird covered ground.  Then Reacher, with his amazing lope, his speed, ran around me and attempted to head the bird off.

He did this at least four times.  Twice on hens, which we passed on per normal.  And once it didn’t work.  The bird won!  We didn’t kick it up.  But then, on one of his loops, sort of a corralling effort, it came together.  He got to the other side of a runner and stopped it.  When the bird exploded it was within range, and fell.  And Reacher retrieved to hand.  It was all I could ask for.

Between that bird and the incidental flushes, we collected three birds on that hunt.  Reacher has learned that he can outrun a pheasant, no mean task!  He can loop around and block their escape.  He can corral them, at least occasionally.  Pheasants run, hide and and fly.  But flying is a last resort.  They vastly prefer to run, which is a lot less of a calorie push.  If anything, hens prefer to hide.  They are well adapted to this strategy.  But an experienced canine can contend with this mixed strategy, that makes pheasant hunting what it is. 

Here at Joy of Hunting our dogs get a real mixed bag workout.  Clients may or may not be interested in the waterfowl aspect, the mix of cacklers and full size Canadas, but their dogs are exposed to pheasant in optimal pheasant habitat, and sharptail grouse too, especially this year when their numbers are so high!

Training hunting dogs can be an incredible pleasure, or an ordeal.  I have to acknowledge Anne, and her positive reinforcement approach, as it makes the training process slant far more towards the “incredible” pleasure side of the equation!

It’s full tilt hunting season, mid-November at Joy of Hunting in Shepherd, Montana!  Now and again we have clients interested in a mixed bag hunt.  It’s a great pleasure for us and I think the dogs pick up on too!

We are five minutes walking time from:

1.  Pheasants!   In fact I’d amend that to two minutes for our gaudy, long tailed cacklers, as they everywhere including a cattail covered ditch flowing into House Pond, a hundred feet from our front door.

2.  Sharptails!  The grouse winter here, and this year we are seeing exceptional numbers.

3.  Ducks and Geese!  

​It’s full tilt hunting season, mid-November at Joy of Hunting in Shepherd, Montana!  Now and again we have clients interested in a mixed bag hunt.  It’s a great pleasure for us and I think the dogs pick up on too!

We are five minutes walking time from:

1.  Pheasants!   In fact I’d amend that to two minutes for our gaudy, long tailed cacklers, as they everywhere including a cattail covered ditch flowing into House Pond, a hundred feet from our front door.

2.  Sharptails!  The grouse winter here, and this year we are seeing exceptional numbers.

3.  Ducks and Geese!  Early season was busy with local woodies.  Then we had a couple days of snow in October that brought northern birds with it, including redheads and canvasback!  These beautiful and sporty birds gravitate to Fish Fry Lake.  And we are now planning to keep three areas on the lake open with Ice Rippers.  Should make for an extended late season on northern mallards.  But then, we also have the river and huge numbers of geese, including Canadas, cacklers, the occasional snows, and there was even a rare Quinn Lake goose harvested here last season.  (include photo)

4.  Deer, both mulies and whitetail!  Our non-harvested grain fields pull deer in, including some record book bucks!  Yesterday morning Anne glassed five bucks from our bedroom balcony, including a big guy on a scrape about 200 yards from the house!  We are seeing the occasional monster muley buck too, as a large adjacent ranch initiated trophy deer management five years ago!  

5.  Predators!  Coyote, red fox, and the occasional bobcat.  It can be incredibly exciting to have coyotes running full tilt towards a squalling rabbit!  Either daytime, or at night with spotlights, the action can be amazing, and pelts are in prime condition now too.

6.  The invasive collard dove appear to be here to stay, and unlike mourning dove, they overwinter!  We collected 31 birds in about twenty minutes last season, as birds piled into a roosting point.  And the birds are good eating!

7.  Fall turkey season runs from Sept. 1 to Jan. 1.  and the fruit laden Russian Olives along the river bottom provide a favorite late season meal for these heavy, branch breaking birds!

All this hunting is just moments from our home.  And then there’s Fish Fry Lake, another marvel!  Think bass up to 6.25#s, black crappie up to 17”s, northern yellow perch pushing two pounds, 1.25 pound bluegill and even heavier red ear sunfish!  We can fish through the ice from a trap door in a Gazebo on a floating island!

A wild fish and game diet is easy to maintain here at Shepherd.  We cook most meals in black cast iron cookware and frequently eat in front of a roaring fireplace in our living room.  Or we actually grill with a specialized system on that same fireplace!  Probably eat barbecue grilled meat more in the winter than the summer in fact!

Shepherd is a magical place!  Come join us for a memorable hunt experience.

​stench, clouds of mosquitoes, and something that I didn’t know then was a prime indicator of lack of health, the absence of biodiversity.  At the time I could not have stated that generalist species like mosquitoes and anoxic bacteria do not represent biodiversity.

Yesterday I skinned a porcupine.  

​Right now there’s porcupine sirloin marinating in a bowl of salt water.  Surprisingly easy to skin, by the way, but not something I’d recommend for the casual paleo enthusiast!

Bear with me as I take you through some disparate thinking.  We are currently transitioning our hunting dogs from a kibble based diet to a more ancestral one.  Over the last three years, our “pups” have been slowly weaned from kibbles to the following:   trim meat from Canada Geese, venison, antelope, fresh dried fish from Fish Fry Lake (eleven different species), American Bullfrog, pheasant, cottontail rabbit, jack rabbit, raccoon, a wide variety of duck, bison, organ meat from all of the above, and raw bone with residual fresh meat.  In truth, goose and pheasant and fish make up the bulk of their diet, but the mix, the other varieties of game, contribute to the goal, which is biocomplexity.  Actually, the goal is health.  Biocomplexity is how we get there.

Today there are veterinarians that endorse the above.  The movement towards ancestral diet is really pervasive.  And as one would expect, there may very well be other holistic practices being interwoven into this theme, like chiropractic.  I’m not a believer in chiropractic, but I don’t discount it either.  But just the fact that there is movement towards ancestral diet is energizing!

And what about us?  Are we inflicting this ancestral diet on our “dependents” without willingness to engage?  Well, considering that our dogs are carnivorous while we are omnivorous, I think we are otherwise on a similar page.  Other than the raw bone, we eat all of the above too.  Trim meat in the mix, and preferred cuts too, of course.  And frankly, we eat all of the above in front of our canines.  

There is one point that jumps out at me.  No way humans can back into an ancestral diet under today’s scenario.  Way too many of us live in urban and sub urban settings.  Think about this, as it is the nidus point.  What route will our race take into the future?  I very seriously doubt it will be akin to what we practice here at Shepherd.  Nine billion people disallow it.

Please view us as an experiment.  A set of data points that might inspire other creative options.  And know that if you reach out, we are receptive.  We are always willing to host other like minded individuals.  We’ve had folks from 45 different countries visit us, live with us for a short time.  Brainstorm with us.  Let’s take it to 75!

coming off Sam and a lifetime of Labrador.  My sense is the American version of Brittany, well trained, is an awesome dog.  This is borne out by numerous experiences in watching hunters with their terrific variety of canines…Labs, Britts and other spaniels, German Shorthairs and other pointers, setters, vizslas, and even Labradoodles, as they come through the Shepherd hunting preserve that doubles the length of bird-hunting season.

But training a Britt has been a humbling experience for me.  Two days ago exemplified this fact.  It reminded me of the fuzzy connection between luck and drive, between fate and chance, between ambition and reality.  

We rose well before light, trudging onto a berm looking down on a triticale field lost to hail back in August.  All the grain was still there, excepting what the whitetail, muleys and pheasants had already consumed by this time in December.  It had been winter triticale, planted the previous fall, and with a wet year was really impressive, standing four-feet tall.  But now it was lodged over, with tons of volunteer plants greening up the bottom.  The combination provided food, security cover, and thermal mass, all of which is what you want going into a Montana winter if you’re a pheasant.  Another terrific feature is that the deer have worked a web of access trails across and through the field, making walking through it reasonable.  

Birds roost in this field.  They also stage in it, coming off serious cattail security cover on either side, as they make their way to an adjacent deep draw where they spend the day amidst Russian Olive and nearly impenetrable plum, pin cherry and juniper thickets.  It’s not unusual for a hundred birds to pass over the berm we were sitting on within a half hour of dawn.  Shooting them this way is challenging.  The birds know we are there with the first shot, and for them speed and “safety in numbers" is their survival strategy.  Except for some, who trust in their ability to hide in the dense lodged over triticale.  When it’s all said and done, the birds are right more often than we are.  Nearly all escape to the draw without being shot at.  And even the ones being shot at aren’t in too much danger at that cold, dusky time of day.  That was how we started this particular morning.

We’d waited until a full half hour after legal, then sent the dogs into the field, while we held back and waited.  The melee that followed was incredibly exciting!  Birds zipped by at head level.  I swear you could feel the breeze as they swept by, with no safe shot opportunity much of the time unless you were willing to lift your gun over adjacent hunters, and take a radical going away shot…not good!  Not appropriate.  So only the occasional bird, in front of the guns, was shot at.  

We did get warmed up…at least.  And the half hour of sitting still had left me with a sense of where other birds were in what we call the Spiral wetland, so I had a direction in which to point Reacher after that first explosive episode.  I could have asked Anne to bring expert retriever Vio in our direction, but my hubris and desire to push Reacher made me want to let him solo.  There is also a tension between Labs and pointers…Vio flushes birds, while Reacher is able to slow down and lock into a point.  So keeping Vio out of Reacher’s potential point scenarios was my goal for that morning.

The American Brittany is a long-legged dog that will gladly range.  In Reacher’s case, think three hundred yards…in seconds.  In serious pheasant cover, you can lose your Britt in a flash.  GPS and related technology help, but pups need some support.  When they get a snootful of bird, they can push too hard too fast, especially on pheasant, which are only grudgingly point steady.  Not like huns, or sharptail.  And when they lock onto a point, it may take five minutes to catch up.  Pheasants are not famous for waiting that long.  So the birds frequently blow out, and the dog is uncertain…does it chase the sky-borne bird, or look for another.  In any case, the dog is essentially hunting for itself, and not experiencing the big reward…mouthful of pheasant.  Keeping Reacher within range, my range, seemed like me fighting his in-bred conditioning to range.  Maybe I should have gone with a French Brittany, a closer ranging dog.  But Reacher and I are stuck with each other.  We have to figure out a compromise…and that had me living on my audible tone and buzzer to keep Puppy at a workable distance.

We approached a dense patch of cattail, and for once, Reacher was just thirty yards out.  There’d been a lot of pre-dawn cackling originating from this area, so it looked really good.  Sure enough, Reacher locks up, partially.  His stub of a tail is wagging furiously, but is straight out instead of straight up.  False point, but evolving towards a true point.  

Then everything goes South.  Birds start getting up, in several directions.  I pick one, maybe fifteen yards in front of Reacher and quartering away, but the cloudy morning contributes to my less than impeccable shot.  The bird falters, then goes down, but not in a cloud of feathers.  It lights in sedge on the outside of the cattails, and Reacher, who is truly distracted by all the birds, does not appear to have marked it.

So here I am on the audible, trying to bring Reacher to heel so I can give him a line on the downed bird.  He is not at the point where I can hand signal him into the bird any other way, and again, remember that I’m a fledgling pointer trainer.  So for now, bringing Reacher to heel, giving him a line, is my method.  It works, sort of of.  Excited Reacher is very willing to sprint after flying birds, but in truth he is also learning that it doesn’t work.  He comes to heel, in about two minutes or so.

How far can a crippled rooster with sound legs run in a minute or so?  Maybe it’s not a runner?  Maybe it’s stone dead?  But the scenario is further complicated by more birds, late birds, still getting up.  Yes, I could shoot again, and further confuse the scene.  But I defer.  My intention is to collect the bird that was hit.  Reacher had heard the shot, and I’m reasonably sure he has made the connection between noise of shot, and the big reward of bird-in-mouth, and least the occasional connection!  So he comes to heel…and I give him a line on where the bird went down, just twenty-five yards out.

He takes the line, then turns and angles off to the right, without ever quite getting to the spot I’d marked.  A slight breeze makes me think that maybe he did smell the bird, that it’s a runner, and he’s on it.  No real way for me to be sure.  So while Reacher is zig zagging across the field of vetch, I pull off my vest and drop it, to mark the spot, and set off to follow in Reacher’s wake.  

A hundred and twenty yards later Reacher is looking super birdy, tail going a hundred miles an hour, when a rooster goes airborne right in front of him!   I watch it.  No sign of it being crippled at all.  So now I bring Reacher back to heel, and return to the vest.  Give him another line, urging him to hunt the marked spot where the bird went down.  He does, sort of, but then is off again in a direct line towards where the cripple had been flying before it went down.

This gives me pause.  Do I buzz him back, to make sure my bird isn’t stone dead and lying right there hidden in the dense sedge?  Or do I trust this puppy to have gotten it right?

Hands off the buzzer.  And I’m wishing that Anne and Vio were here…zen masters of bird retrieval.  Handy-dandy wrist phone…so I call Anne and ask for some Labrador support.  In the meantime, Reacher has made it to the most dense patch of cattail in the Spiral…about three acres of seven foot high cover.  I see birds getting up, probably marking his progress.  Then I catch sight of cattail movement towards the far side.  That’s where he is.  And right in front of him a rooster blows out.

Oh Shit!  He’d just been after another bird.  He hadn’t smelled blood.  

But then just a moment later, I hear the squeal, like a high pitched cackle, marking bird in mouth of dog.  The cattails had stopped moving too.  

For the next ten minutes I progress towards the direction of the sound.  No GPS help today either, and I’m just trusting on my last visual of the cattail movement.  Anne and Vio are five minutes away.  

I call Reacher’s name.  I press the three tone audio, his signal to turn my way.  Nothing.  Am I competing with bird in mouth?  Reacher doesn’t know the fetch command yet, at least not well.  Of the two dozen birds that have been shot over him so far, he has brought six back.  I’m hoping this is number seven.  

Anne and Vio appear on the south end of the cattails, and I’m on the north when I spot Reacher, outside of cattails plucking a rooster.  The bird is still alive, barely.  Reacher won’t bring the bird to hand for me, from twenty feet away.  I scoot back while calling him, but no deal.  He is willing to come, but without the bird.  Not perfect, but the bird isn’t going anywhere and I ultimately pick it up and bag it.

Reacher had not marked the bird, and did not necessarily associate it with the shot.  He just new that he’d caught it and I wanted to take it away from him.  Not fair, from his perspective.  

I remember one Britt that would find a bird and head away from it’s hunter to pluck and even bury the bird.  Not every time, but particularly when the dog felt it had done most of the work.  Something about Britts.

 The breed seems to be on the wild side, as if they are closer to their wild lineage than say, Labs.  In this case, my shot had broken the bird's wing.  Just one or two BBs had connected.  Reacher had done his part, and then some.  He’d found the bird.  All the other birds contributed to the confusion.  But we’d been ultimately able to work it out. 

Are puppy noses more sensitive and receptive than the noses of older dogs?  Had Reacher smelled that bit of blood on the bird’s wing?  He had staying with it, and finally caught it.  Vio is famous for this.  She lives for blind retrieves. Her level of trust with a “line” is legendary.  Can we have that in a Brittany?

I think Reacher’s coming on.  It’s his trainer that needs work!