Last fall I started Lira in truffle hunting classes through Truffle Dog Company here in Seattle and after finishing up the Foundations class it was pretty clear she was ready to skip Intermediate and move into Pre-Advanced and Advanced.  Since early December we’ve been doing training hunts with real truffles most of the time and have been going out “hunting” a few days a week though she had never really even started digging but we knew it was a horrible year for truffles.   This last few weeks things have gotten a bit more interesting as she started finding spots she was very interested in and dug a few holes where we’d find nothing or just heavy mycelium.

On Wednesday this week she did her first Advanced class and got to run with a real truffle dog, Gator, and another doggy student, Stanley.   After Gator found a real truffle finally Lira got a bit more interested and dug a few spots that had mycelium or came up empty.  Finally she started one dig and we had Gator go in and see if he could find something after Lira gave up, sure enough there was a black truffle in there.   So her first wild truffle needed an assist but she found it.  We celebrated that evening eating Venison with Black Truffle.

Today we went out to an area close to the house where she did a pretty big dig early in the week but I only found mycelium in the hole.  She was sniffing around and not really getting interested in anything until we got to one spot where she ran off the trail and did a big loop checking out everything on the ground but never stopped to dig.  On the way back we went past the same area and she ran in, jumped up on a fallen log and stuck her nose at the end of a broken tree limb.  I wondered what she was doing and sure enough there was a black truffle in the torn up part of the tree, no doubt left by an enterprising squirrel.   This is her first totally on her own truffle even if she didn’t have to dig for it.  It was 1/2 oz but a bit chewed up so I’m breaking it into pieces to use as more training truffles, had an incredible odor to it and would have been great had we found it before the squirrel.  This got her going and she hunted very carefully after that finding one deer truffle and wanting to get to something under a fallen log for a long time, we tried from both directions to find the truffle but it was just too buried.

We have the next Advanced class in a few weeks to a white truffle area which is mostly what I’ve been training her with since I knew they were shallower.  In the meantime I’m going to start using black truffles more for training and get her out a few more days on our own, it seems like it is finally starting to come together both with truffles ripening up and Lira really getting what truffle hunting is all about.