Acting nonchalant

Last year Lira did pretty well as a pup hunting in the fall, she found birds, she mostly pointed and rarely bumped them and she retrieved most of the time.  She also liked to chase other dogs around the field quite a bit and locally found ‘easy’ birds that were not in too thick of cover for the most part.    This year she really changed a lot.  No more chasing other dogs around or even wanting to outside of the usual parking lot sniffing and the who let the dogs out initial walk into the fields.  Once she gets to the grass she is all business, nose to the ground looking for birds.   She’s also become fearless of heavy cover.  She will go into anything that she can possibly get into to go after a pheasant and has flushed birds out of brambles so thick that i couldn’t get the bird to move by kicking the crap out of the outer layers of the stuff.   She’s grabbed cripples and even a few unscathed birds that got trapped in thick stuff and couldn’t get out before she got to them.  Just a few days ago she ran down a wing shot rooster who took off up a corn row and brought the bird out still kicking and flapping but Lira’s tail was up. She also finally lets me take a photo without constantly trying to grab the bird on the ground, that was a huge accomplishment.  We’ve gotten twice as many birds in the first three weeks of the season than all of last season and I’ve missed or not had shots at quite a few that she found in really thick stuff where shooting can be a challenge to say the least.   The season is about half over since I’ll be gone most of next week but I can’t wait to see what November brings.