Getting Your Retriever in the Thick of Things

If you were going to go pheasant shooting on a farm where you’d never been before, where would you start your search? You would probably head for the thickest cover because you know that’s where birds feel safest and therefore tend to hang out the most, right? Well, when you take your retriever or other flushing dog hunting, that’s where you want him to spend most of his time, too. If you train with that in mind, you should end up with a dog that is excited about aggressively working the thick stuff.

In earlier articles about introducing your retriever to upland hunting, I talked a lot about training your dog to hunt within range. For those exercises, the type of cover doesn’t really matter. In fact, you usually start out those exercises in shorter cover where it’s easier to keep an eye on your dog. To ingrain the idea that birds are in the thick cover, however, you definitely need to train where you have lots of places to hide your training birds.

As soon as a dog is confidently covering ground, which means it's using its nose and consistently quartering back and forth, I ensure that it only finds birds in dense cover. This differs from the past when I might have had assistants on each side of the field shouting and waving a bird before throwing it into plain view to excite the dog. Now I want the dog to use its nose to search for birds it can't see. So, I might use the assistants again to capture the dog's attention, but they're merely calling the dog into the thick brush to search for a bird they've already hidden. Once the dog has picked up the scent, it should be able to locate the bird.

Another thing I'll do is walk a dog on a simulated hunt and alternate between dense cover and sparser cover. I'll keep some wing-clipped pigeons in my jacket, and when we're in the dense undergrowth and the dog is working away from me, I'll toss a bird off to the side in the opposite direction. Now when he swings back that way he'll scent it and then find it, again reinforcing the idea that success comes when he hunts the dense undergrowth.

Another way to encourage a dog to work the cover whilst at the same time teaching tracking skills is to plant a shackled pheasant in the cover beforehand and then return with the dog to work towards that area. Hopefully, that pheasant will have moved off and now when the dog picks up the scent, he’ll start using his nose to track it down. I prefer to use hen pheasants for this because they tend not to run as far or fast. A mallard is another suitable training bird because it will move but not overly quickly, and a duck leaves a good, strong scent trail.

I do get a lot of questions about what to do if a dog just isn’t that keen on hunting the cover or even worse, if a dog wants to walk behind you. This can be tough to deal with because there comes a point as a dog matures where if he doesn’t have a passion for birds, you can’t just force it into him. However, if it’s as simple as a dog just not having the confidence to get out and seek game, I’ll work that dog through thinner cover and then every so often pull out a wing-clipped pigeon and sail it into the thick stuff. If the dog has any retrieving spirit at all, that should get him fired up enough to chase after it and pull it out of the cover.

This all really goes back to a very simple concept: Get your young retriever plenty of positive, successful experiences with feathers and live birds at a very young age. A dog that loves the game of seeking and finding feathers should continue to want to play that game no matter where the birds are hiding.