​Yesterday evening Reacher and I spent the last hour of daylight sitting on our property boundary listening to the clamor of several thousand Canada geese, just a short quarter mile away, grazing on the manure  of a cattle pasture.  The manure contains minimally digested corn kernels, and trust me, this pulls in the geese big time!  It’s right up there with sugar beet trim!  On the one hand, this makes me wonder about the ultimate “palatability” of the geese.  Yet, in reality, we always work hard to be certain that our freezer(s) contain our bag limit quota at the end of each season.  A carefully managed freezer gets us through our paleo requirements over the balance of the year. 

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.  ​