Only Optimists Own Bird Dogs

My recent videos about Covey being trained at Standing Stone Kennels raises questions about cost/benefit ratios, my intelligence, Ethan’s training skills, and Covey’s hunting instincts —among others. Overriding all of this, however, is the realization that owning and training a bird dog exposes your optimism.

You can’t be a card carrying curmudgeon and pessimist if you own a bird dog.

Only an optimist would invest the thousands of dollars and years of time — some of it fretful, worrisome, even painful — nurturing, training, enduring, and embracing a canine in the hope that it might brighten a few autumn days and add a few birds to your table. One does this despite knowing these potential highlights bracket more predictable dog’s life experiences. Puddles on the rug, vomit on the sofa, hair in the air, family heirlooms chewed to pulp. There will be porcupine quills in the face, eau de skunk accompanying two-hour drives home. You’ll endure late night searches over miles of empty prairie followed by later night visits to present the veterinarian with large checks. And so on.

Ah, but that exuberant leap of limbs through the grass, that flow of head and back and tail suddenly stopped, locked and loaded. Arrested energy held in check by an unseen olfactory signal we can only imagine… That is the optimist’s reward.

A bird dog that sweeps the fields, detects the prey, pins it and awaits the master and gun — that is our drug of choice, the upland hunter’s high from which there is no crash, no regret save saying goodbye when that troublesome pup, that mischievous imp grows and slows and fades. And then the end, the long goodbye convinces you the early optimism was not worth the pain. For you will never again see that smiling muzzle leaping from the grass, those ears flapping in the wind, that tail quivering and locking like an exclamation point before that penultimate explosion of wings that binds you two. That noble head will never again place itself upon your leg with a grateful sigh. You’ll never again stroke those silky ears.

Dog tired

This is the turn of the orb, the wheel on which you and your pup will spin for 10, 12, 17 years if you’re lucky. And that answers the questions for me. If I’m going to endure all the above, invest and share a decade of pain, joy, potential, adventure and discovery with this beautifully formed, exuberant setter, we might as well get it right. Training Covey myself might be more organic, less expensive, more “real.” But it might also waste her potential, limit her success and ultimately mine. Professional tuning by a proven team like Standing Stone Kennels is small price to pay for perfected performance.

There will be hitches and glitches, stumbles and mistakes by both Covey and me this fall and beyond as we pursue ruffed grouse, dusky grouse, spruce grouse, sage grouse, gray and chukar partridges, sharptails, prairie chickens, more pheasants and scaled quail. We will pit ourselves against the Sonoran desert and its Gambel’s quail, the bordering oak hills and Mearn’s quail, Nevada and mountain quail, Alaska and ptarmigan. A continent of birds. A lifetime of adventure that Standing Stone Kennels has helped prepare us for. We should start in about four months. Stay tuned.

Here we go on a lifetime of hunting adventures.