I didn’t make it out for the closing of the waterfowl season. I did, however, have a great day at the pheasant shooting preserve training dogs. It was a chilly day, but beautiful and mostly sunny. We set the birds in thick cover along the river and gave them plenty of time to move around and leave good scent trails. I happend to have had all retrievers (flushers) we were training, so the thick cover was excellent for them. The dogs worked the birds well and the birds flushed with gusto and flew strong. It was a great training day for the dogs. We were able to work on a lot of different aspects: hunting close, not chasing running birds (coming back into gun range when called), flushing, pulling off missed birds, tracking wounded birds, and retrieving. It also tuned us up on our bird shooting. Mike, George’s son-in-law was a newcomer to upland game hunting; he did great and had a ball! Hopefully he’ll be hooked on upland game gunning for good.
