FETCH!

Picking Up After a Great Hunt

By Dog Willing Publications

September 26^th, 2021

In the UK dogs and handlers can participate in something called "Beating and Picking Up" where game is flushed towards shooters — that's the beating part — and anything the shooters kill is then picked up.

We don't do that here, well, at least the beating part. But we often do a sort of "picking up" after a duck hunt. You see, much of our waterfowling is done when temps hover near the freezing point. So making our dogs sit next to us, wet and shivering, seems downright cruel. That's why we often just leave them in the truck until after we've downed a few birds, then bring them out to do the 'picking up'.

This year's opening week was pleasantly warm, but I decided to take the shoot-first-and-pick-up-later option. That way, I could focus on bagging some ducks and then exchange my gun for my camera later on to get some shots of the dogs at work. Here are some of my favourite images from the first week of the 2021 season. I will add more as the season progresses. Stay tuned!

Picking up also involves gathering spent cartridge hulls, even our new favourite shell from BioAmmo. We use Mojo's excellent Pick-Up Stick which makes the post-hunt clean-up a breeze!

We also do some picking up in the uplands!

Another week, another set of fetch photos.

These photos are from a foggy-morning goose hunt just outside of town. It was a good shoot, and each dog got a chance to retrieve some birds. First up was our youngster, Rooster, an eager, natural retriever that has already fetched dozens of ducks for us, as well as ruffed and sharptailed grouse, Hungarian partridges and some woodcock. On this day, for some reason, when I sent him to bring in a goose he struggled to figure out just how to pick it up. But instead of shouting at him or trying to turn a hunt into a formal training session (with me, a poor trainer), I decided to bring out the old veteran Zeiss to show him how it's done. And it worked like a charm! Rooster watched Zeiss fetch a monster goose and then immediately ran and picked up the bird he had originally been sent to fetch.

Greater and Lesser

You will note the huge difference in size between the birds Zeiss and Leo have in their photos and the one that Rooster has. This is due to fact that we have both Greater and Lesser Canada geese here and in recent years, we've been seeing more mixed flocks of them. By sheer luck of the draw, Rooster got the smallest and easiest birds to fetch. Next time, I hope we drop some bigger ones for him. He is, after all, our biggest dog!