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.

RED HOT

November 13th and 14th

November 13th Moxi hunted at a preserve for a group from a Mpls based company. Running pheasants and wet heavy snow 13 of 17 birds recovered. November 14th Moxi did more preserve work for a father son team. 8 birds released 24 birds pointed 6 birds recovered.

All in all a great way to spend the weekend.

Out of the pages of Field & Stream

Halloween after an hour in the field and woods Moxi found me several pheasants and 2 grouse due to my shooting skills it took a little extra for me to get my limit of pheasant for the day and shortly after the photo was taken I shot my second rooster.
November 7th 2010 60 degrees. Five minutes into the field Moxi went on point and we soon had our first rooster, 20 minutes later she pointed a second and we were done for the day. It took me an hour to drive there, so we walked around for a while and she found 3 more that we watched fly away.

late summer training for Sadie

September 18th 2010 Sadie now 6 months old developing her her pointing skills and also har backing skills by honoring Moxi's point. Sadie works very hard at finding her birds and does fairly well at her age. I took her out on her own the next day and she was able to find 2 pheasants. I would say she's off to a great start.

Next Generation: Sadie

Sadie is the result of a breeding with Kira and a carefuly selected Sire.

Sadie has already shown signs of being a smart, hard drivin, hunting dog/trial dog.

Spring 2010

Spring of 2010 Moxi brought home Second Place in Open shooting Dog competition.

Early Spring

Moxi keeping her skills sharp working scratch birds on a local shooting preserve a couple weeks before they close for the season. She had to wait quit a while before I could get to her and yes we did get the bird.

Final December Hunt

Our final December hunt the last day of season included Kira. Though Kira didn't find any pheasants she was there to back Moxi with out so much as a flinch.
We got our limit of 3 and went home after 2 hours in the field.