Early hunting season offers opportunity for retrievers, pointers to hone their skills

Even Michael Phelps would have been a disappointment had he put off his seasons of pool training until a few days before the Summer Olympics. Your bird dog’s performance this weekend – Washington’s opener for quail and partridge seasons – may not garner international attention, but the principles are the same.

Pointer or retrievers that have been vegetating in the house, yard or kennel since last fall aren’t likely to be putting on a stellar performance, regardless of their athletic prowess or lineage.

This basic concept was re-enforced to me last spring at a shoot-to-retrieve fun trial at Squaw Canyon Shooters near Rosalia.

This was not a high-stakes field-trial event with high-powered dogs that rocket ahead of a gallery following on horseback.

The Snake River Sportsman and Gun Dog Association sponsors five of these events a year as training and tune-up opportunities. Great dogs are mixed in with not-so- great dogs, and the same can be said for the dog handlers.

Some of the dogs had all the natural talent money can buy surging through their veins. Others were leftovers – giveaways that landed with a man or woman who wanted to put the dogs’ talents to work.

Some of these dogs would rather snort through cheatgrass and comb the scablands than eat rib-eye steak from your hand.

Some of them are full-fledged family members who sleep on their handler’s bed and have a vote in household affairs.

They all have a diehard instinct to find game birds.

That part was all natural.

Every one of the dogs in the fun trial field that day was a standout compared with a high percentage of the dogs in the fields this weekend, and the reason went beyond their blood lines.

“Most of us work with our dogs year-round,” said Ed Johnson, the club’s president from Palouse.

All of the club-member’s dogs had the stamina to run hard through 30-minute braces on a hot day to find pen-raised chukars scattered around a hundred acres.

Nobody yelled or screamed or kicked at his dog.

“If you have the training fundamentals down, the more time you spend with your, the better it will be,” Johnson said.

Ken Matson of the Tri-Cities gave every bird dog owner some hope by winning one of the fun trial events with a 20-month-old German wire-haired pointer named Pepper.

“She was the last of the litter,” he said, noting that Pepper lacked in the scrub-brush coat that characterizes the breed.

“Nobody wanted her, so I took her,” he said.

“And today I’ve learned how good a dog can be if you give it attention and commit to its conditioning.”

Asked what advice he’d give to the hoarse hunters coming back frustrated from the opening weekend with foot-sore dogs, Medical Lake dog trainer Dan Hoke was philosophical:

Look at each day in the early season as a training opportunity, he said.

“Then shoot for December and January.”