If everything goes well with birds from my hand, it’s time to move on to birds from the ground introduction.
With the ground intro, I don’t care at all about pointing. This is not a pointing drill. All we are doing is introducing the dog to finding birds on the ground. I don’t care if he creeps (cat-stalking the bird) or gets too close. If he points, that’s fine. If he doesn’t, that’s fine too. I’ll gently restrain him just enough so he doesn’t catch it. This all has to be a positive experience. I’ll do a couple sessions of this before I move on to remote launcher work.
For the ground intro, I plant a bird in a kick cage, which is a small metal cage that holds a bird so it doesn’t fly off, that you tip over to release the bird. You’ll see in the first video, this doesn’t always go as planned!!
I like to move the dog across the scent cone (scent cone is the stream of scent, more on this in another post). If the wind is coming from the west, I walk the dog north/south to catch the scent of the bird. We screwed up in these videos and started taping too late. In the first video he catches the scent of the bird right as we started rolling the camera. In the second video it’s very noticeable when he catches the scent - about the 2 second mark. Sometimes the signs of catching the scent is much less obvious than this. If you notice, at no time do I try to stop him from moving in on the bird. Our ultimate goal is to have him stop and point at first scent, but for now, I’m not to concerned with it. That will come in time. Everything is done in baby steps, and all I’m concerned about right now is introducing him to finding birds on the ground and showing him that birds are fun!