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For a bit now, I’ve joked that Hank is a hunting “breed” and not a hunting “dog” as he had yet really hunted. Well, that changed the week before Thanksgiving! We left on Tuesday morning and made a late night stop in Aberdeen, SD and heading on to our destination the next morning in North Dakota. There we met BOY, his father, BIL, and their 3 dogs.
Not a whole lot of great story telling, nor any pictures or lies about rock solid points that would be on the cover of Pointing Dog Journal. But, Hank got into a lot of birds. He learned how to cross fences and that if one’s not paying attention they can bite! It didn’t take him long to start working cover and staying, for the most part, close enough to me to be of help. Though I did have to do quite a bit of recall with him as he likes to chase flushed birds and a lot of the birds apparently had track shoes on! All in all the two of us had blast and learned a bunch! I did learn that I shoot my 20ga 870 better than my Mossberg 12ga and that 20ga 3” #5s do a great job on roosters. Now I just need to keep him on birds!
Still need to work on getting his point stronger. Running birds didn’t help, but at least he didn’t catch any! He can definitely find birds and was not too timid to get in the woolies after them. He did dang good on retrieves when he could mark them. Not quite as good if he didn’t or than ran a bit. Mostly I was pretty happy with his retrieving. But, the last bird he retrieved he did NOT want to give it up. It was alive when he got to me with it. It was not by the time I got it out of his mouth… Definitely need to work more on tracking!
Time for pictures!
Hank with his first wild rooster!




Hank and I with a pair we rooted out of a big field!


Hank doing his thing! I did put a protective vest on him the last day or two as his chest/belly was getting pretty wore out.






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