Lira with a pigeon she flushed and caught
Two months ago Catherine and I headed to Portland to pick up our new pup, an Australian Labradoodle that we named Lira (Lira means River in aboriginal Australian). These last few months have been interesting as we have taken on training Lira not only to be a companion in the house but also a bird dog. She just turned 5 months old a few days ago and looking back we can really see how far she’s come in just a few months time. When we picked Lira up she basically knew NO and OFF and that was about it, she wasn’t totally crate trained or housebroken yet.
Luckily the kennel training went fast, within a week she stopped fussing in her crate at night. The trick here was slamming the top of the crate when she started whining, it only took one time to do the trick and since then she has been great in her crate. Now she loves the crate, she knows when it moves that it means she’s going for a walk or out to a field so she gets pretty excited about it. Housebreaking happened within two weeks and within a week she had stopped wetting the kennel at night so that was fast too.
We did some of her basic obedience with Mary at North Bend Retriever Kennels who got us started with the basics of HERE and SIT and heeling. SIT came easy, she sits on command, on hand command and on whistle most of the time. SIT and STAY she still has issues with, she doesn’t really get staying still too well. She can heel when she wants to and has gotten much easier to walk just over the last week. If we have her in train mode she’ll be almost flawless, it is when she’s in wild mode that it is tough.
Lira is a retrieving fool and loves to play fetch which she figured out pretty quickly first in the house and then outside. She plays several times a day with her dummies and I’ve been working on DROP which she understands but is still inconsistent on, this needs more work.
The second time we took her to training Mary threw her a live pigeon to see how she’d do. She took off for the bird which was flapping and struggling and Lira didn’t know what to make of it. We got her excited about the bird and she finally grabbed it and carried it back to a ton of praise. She retrieved that pigeon 3-4x that day and got more bold with each retrieve. A few weeks later we did it again and there was no hesitation on the bird and so I took that pigeon home and ended up getting a few more once I got a loft built by the house. Since then Lira has progressed from retrieving tied birds to flushing and catching birds that are flight disabled but can run and take off briefly. She is bird happy and goes completely crazy with her pigeons.
Tagging along on the hunt
Last week I decided it was time to try and see how she did with gunfire since she was 5 months old. I took her out with a friend and we used his dummy launcher as the fire. While he sent the dummy off for his dogs I tossed a dead chukar for Lira at a distance and slowly moved closer until we were right by the launcher. We then had her chase the other dog after the dummy, she loved it. We then planted some pheasants and let Lira tag along while the other dog hunted up the birds. She did not seem bothered by the 12 gauge fire on the pheasants at all.
Lira with her first hen pheasant
Next we planted a hen pheasant for her. She quickly picked up the scent, found the bird, flushed it and we shot it. We had to direct her to the bird to retrieve and she ran to it then had to figure out how to pick up such a big bird. She finally grabbed it by the neck and half carried, half dragged it to me. Her first pheasant!
I now have a dummy launcher of my own and will start getting her out on the launcher to do longer retrieves. I am considering changing to quail so we can go plant birds and shoot them to get her fully trained up by fall and my friend is raising her a few hen pheasants for later in the year. I need to get her working on quartering in the field, she kind of gets it but it needs work. At the rate she’s going though I think she’ll be ready for some real hunting by the time the season rolls around this fall.