Meliora Drents

Iris attended her first North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association Training Day this past weekend, hosted by the lovely folks of the San Diego NAVHDA Chapter. While she was introduced to birds as a 7 week old puppy, caught a pigeon in our backyard once, and was recently introduced to Mearns Quail on our trip to Arizona last month, I’ve never really done any bird work with her. I had intended to when we brought her home, but other priorities got in the way.

Iris joined the puppy/new dog group at the training day, which was focused on building interest, drive, and confidence with birds, introducing the concept of tracking downed game, and desensitizing to gunfire and the bird launcher. To no one’s surprise, Iris was OBSESSED. I purposefully did not ask her for any obedience or control around the birds – the idea was to unlock the bird brain, and asking for too much control too early was likely to instill conflict.

The first step was just showing the dogs a bird – briefly letting them sniff, until they started showing interest. Then they were encouraged to chase the bird, even pick it up in their mouth. We were told that this should only really be done once – ideally we want our dogs pointing birds, not chasing them, and retrieving them with soft mouths. But this first introduction is meant to simply click into place pieces of their instinct that should already be there. It’s meant for young, 4-6 month old puppies, but can be done with a bird dog of any age. Iris was not the only adult, nor the oldest adult dog there, but we were certainly among the “non-traditional student” group.

Iris also experienced her first chain gang, and was tolerant of MANY strange adults, children, and dogs between exercises. The experienced, trained dogs were in the field over, so we heard the occassional gunshot, and at the end of the day, she had some exposure to the bird launcher – two things that could be frightening, but the moment she realized they were associated with birds, became quite the opposite.

I’ve really enjoyed scentwork with Iris because the skills that make her successful are very aligned with the natural instincts of a bird dog. As someone with no hunting experience, very little gun dog training knowledge, and living in a relatively large urban/suburban sprawl, scentwork is a much more accessible way for me to fulfill Iris’s biological drives. Watching her with birds though…. it was a whole new level.

Not sure yet how far we’ll go with bird work. I’ve limited us to four sport “slots”, which are currently filled by scentwork, heelwork, conformation, and canicross; I only have so much time and money, and don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. But unless she pulls a 180 and starts enjoying conformation in the next year, that may fall off of our priority list, and who knows? Maybe we’ll fall into bird dog training. I’m sure she would be ecstatic, and perhaps that’s all the reason I need.