Training up a young bird dog

Raising a young bird dog is always a challenge. Balancing a pup’s enthusiasm with enough discipline to maintain a handle can be difficult, especially when there are too many birds.

That’s not typically a problem. But like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, I found myself peering out the windows at the cabin last week to see if the coast was clear.

It wasn’t.

There were sharptail grouse feeding under the boat parked outside. There were grouse on the split rail fence across the road. There were a couple of others balanced precariously in the very top of the pine tree next door. A pair of...