In the last month since I got home from my Idaho deer hunt I’ve been spending a lot of time out bird hunting with Lira. So much time, in fact, that I haven’t been fishing for a month now. We’ve been spending time at Cooke Canyon in Ellensburg and several of the Snoqualmie Wildlife Areas on the west side. Lira has gotten better and better at finding birds, holding point and retrieving over this month, it has been really fun just watching her progress. She’s also graduated from needing to be leashed up to being able to be free and, for the most part she listens. She definitely would just as soon go out and play with other dogs as hunt though, it takes some prodding and a few zaps to get her out of play mode into hunt mode first thing in the morning.
Cooke Canyon – October
A few days after returning from Idaho I got Lira out at Cooke Canyon so she’d get on some birds for sure. We planted seven hobbled hens and while I had to direct her a bit to the first few birds she held point on each bird and after the first few had no trouble finding birds completely on her own. Somehow miraculously I hit all six birds that took flight and so she got in a lot of retrieving practice too, she caught the seventh bird as it tried to take off but got a bit hung in the brush. She definitely does not want to give up birds easily but will eventually. She did a good job running down a few cripples that I’d just winged.
Stillwater and Crescent Lake
We’ve hit the local areas on five mornings when the weather has been decent. Not a ton of birds but Lira has fun playing with other dogs before we start hunting and then does well covering ground while hunting. This week she found a hen which I missed but we saw it head into the heavy cover and went looking. She found the bird again and this time I hit it and dropped it into a thick berry bramble. Lira dove into the bramble, chased the pheasant around a bit and then came out with the bird in her mouth. I was amazed that she pulled off that retrieve and had grabbed the running bird in that thick cover, I had shot one of the wings off the bird. She still points at tweety birds though which is a bit distracting, she went on hard point in the grain row area and I thought for sure she’d found a pheasant and got ready. A small bird flew up and she grabbed it. Amazingly she dropped it when I told her to and I had to get her away so the bird could get up and fly off without her catching it again.
Cooke Canyon – November
I took her out to Cooke again early this week to get her into some birds after a few trips with no luck locally. This time we planted a mix of roosters and hens, not hobbled so she would have to deal with a moving bird. I missed the first bird which she took off after but this time stopped and came back when I called her, she’s learning. I got the next several birds including one rooster that I winged and took off running when it hit the ground. Lira chased it down and managed to wrangle the much bigger bird into her mouth and back to me, her first rooster. One other rooster managed to go on the run as she found it in the cover, it took off through the grass and Lira chased it down and it flushed, unfortunately I went to shoot and still had my safety on so that one flew off. As we were walking back to the car she found that rooster again and it flushed as soon as she got on point, out of range but we saw where it went. We headed to its landing zone and Lira managed to find the bird a third time. This time I got off a shot just as it entered heavy cover but missed. Lira outperformed me today but we managed to bring home some birds.
We still have a few weeks left of the local season and I plan to get her out on any days it isn’t miserable. We also plan to head over to Eastern Washington in search of wild birds over there which she finally may be ready for. I’d also like to get her into some chukar just to get exposure to a new bird. It has been really nice to see her get better and better with each outing, by next season she’s going to be an excellent little bird dog.