Willy

Here is Willy. Willy is from Kira and littermate to Sadie. Willy is owned by Dean and Jackie Hiller here in Minnesota. They report to me that Willy now 9 months hunts like a pro is a great family dog and lives up to being the clown as irish setters are known for. Willy is very bright and listens great Jackie tells me. Willy has already exceeded the Hiller's expectaions as a pet and hunting dog and are completely in love with him.

Soon I hope to have some hunting pics of him.

Team work

Christmas weekend I went out with Moxi and Kira. I was able to witness Moxi back Kira from roughly 75 to 100 yds away. I was amazed just by the fact that these are my dogs doing this. Moxi typically would not back Kira because Kira will point tweety birds due to her inexperience. Since I've been working them together Kira is begining to ignore the tweety birds and Moxi begining to take Kira's points a little more seriously. Moxi has now been making retrieves something she didn't do before until we started letting Kira come with. Kira loves to retrieve .

I am convinced that hunting with dogs trained at this level combined with their natural instincts does not allow much hope for the wildlife that is being hunted. Using two dogs even seems unfair at times. I've hunted wild birds and preserve birds with these dogs, to be done in 15 to 30 minutes is not unusual. Often my drive is longer than the hunt.

Josh's first pheasant

With Moxi's assistance the day after Thanksgiving Josh, the son of a very good friend of mine Chet who is pictured in an earlier post, decided it was time for his boy to get a taste of shooting pheasants with an old style single shot 20gauge and a dog. Moxi. Well Josh missed the first two but he did get the third one. I think Josh is now hooked on pheasant hunting along with being an accomplished deer hunter with both rifle and bow and arrow. Accompanied with his sister Miranda in photo

Kira's day out with Julie

Thanksgiving weekend and the first weekend in December Kira has been getting into the action. She's been backing Moxi without fail. Kira has even been finding her own birds and Moxi backing her. She also has been making retrieves. I have to say she's not very clear on objectives so she does a lot of extra running around. Kira's nose is outstanding and when on point she looks like a million bucks.
December 4th Kira and Moxi helped good friend of mine, Julie Crawford get her first pheasant. Having missed our share of wild pheasants we stopped by the preserve for some scratch birds. We were told a group of serious hunters worked with four dogs for a better part of the day shooting all of their birds and having seen a couple scratch birds fly off too far ahead to shoot at.
So Julie and I went to that field and indeed 5 mnutes into the field Moxi established point that produced out first bird we then proceeded to see 6 more but they were running and flying off before either of the dogs could get a point on them. On our way back to the truck as the sun was setting the dogs went on point Julie kicked out a rooster and missed about 50 paces and the dogs went on point again Julie kicked out another rooster and down it came, not even realizing the bird had been hit Julie was perplexed with her gun jamming after a bit of putsing with the gun here comes Kira with the rooster in her mouth delivering it to hand completely suprising Julie.