Those are good points well taken.
I think it's a bit of a Catch 22 or chicken and egg thing. It's hard to get serious about birds without a dog and I have no real business with a (bird) dog if I'm not serious about birds.
It's not clear to me what it takes to be serious about birds, besides a dog. If there are not enough birds here, it's not clear to me where to go from here. If I can find birds in a one or two-hour drive, I'd go. If it's a 4 of 5 hours drive, I know it won't work. I did that for about a year with a different dog sport, driving 3 hours each way to a club every weekend. Six hours driving back and forth every Saturday, and the end result wasn't that great because you can't really get good at something if you're only training once a week. It was like martial arts or bird hunting. You can't get good just practicing it alone in your basement.
I think I need to find out where the birds are.
