New Pup

[anser2]

Well after searching ads for several months finally found a pup of the right breed , sex,age and suits my pocket and now the really hard work starts. A 11 month old black lab pup. Pips parents are working dogs and she has several FTCHs in her pedigree. There is a lot of hard work before she is going to be any good in the field. She has had very little control in her last home pulls like hell on her lead and jumps up to greet you and is driving Meg up the wall at the moment as Pip wants to play with her all the time. had to "fence " around Megs bed to stop Pip pestering her. I guess its the excitement of a new home and she is not very used to other dogs . Her previous owner had been very ill and most of her walks had just been out into the back garden . However she loves retrieving and gives up a dummy without too much trouble. She seems to be bonding with me already as soon as I sat down with this PC the lay down at my feet.

 

I will give her a while to get used to me and use a few reward driven commands , sit, stay ect and then next week the hard work starts. I am not in too much of a hurry to use her at the start of next season as Meg has a good few kind flights in her yet , but the new pup will be 18 months old at the start of the next season , so hopefully Pip will at the stage where she can take over the tidal work by mid season.

Edited March 20, 2016 by anser2

[fenboy]

It can be hard work when they have had free reign for a while , but I am sure she will get there .

Good luck with her and I look forward to reading of her progress.

[Ttfjlc]

I remember in the late nineties we had a family trip to Norfolk to look at a black lab bitch named Pip who was also 11 months old, the owner was honest and said he didn't think she'd make the grade but my dad asked for my opinion and we both agreed she had potential. We thought we'd let her settle in for a few weeks before trying anything with her but started her training after 2 days as she walked to heel naturally on and off the lead, would sit and not budge and would retrieve a tennis ball all day if allowed. Pip made me look like the best trainer in the world, she'd go back on command until almost out of sight, I'd only have to breath into the whistle and she would drop like a stone and she had an awesome nose as she once showed up a team of Pickers-up, when they couldn't find a bird in a dyke with 4 'professionally trained' dogs and the whole team of guns witnessed Pip wagging her tail on the way back to my dad with the partridge.

 

Cried my bloody eyes out when she passed aged 11, my apologies if it appears I've hijacked the thread but your post just brought back some happy memories for me, I hope your Pip gives you some as well.

[anser2]

I love to hear doggy tales so keep them coming. Bank account is looking a bit empty for a while with a new gun and dog , plus two clubs subs all within a few weeks of each other.

[Grandalf]

Good luck...

[Ttfjlc]

I love to hear doggy tales so keep them coming. Bank account is looking a bit empty for a while with a new gun and dog , plus two clubs subs all within a few weeks of each other.

I need therapy every time I check my account after the other half has had access to it! Ok I have another one for you, back in the mid-eighties my parents had bought a workshop so money was a bit tight. My Dad (always been a lucky so and so with dogs until he broke the mould and got a spaniel) had a lovely old school yellow Labrador called Ben. The type of dog which he could leave outside his workshop near a busy B-road and the dog would simply just lay there and not move, a local farmer used to borrow Ben for a pheasant shoot as my dad was tied up with work. On one particular shoot a gun clipped a bird and flew the proverbial country mile over the flat fens until out of sight and un-be known to the farmer Ben had took off like a rocket after it and he too disappeared out of sight. It was the last drive of the day so time wasn't an issue but a fellow gun said to the farmer "you've lost that dog" to which he replied "nah he'll be fine", well after 20 minutes the farmer was getting seriously worried when one of the guns spotted him sprinting back with the sun setting behind him.

 

The farmer told my Dad he wished he had a camera because as Ben jumped a fence he blotted out the sun momentarily for that 'Kodak moment' and swiftly delivered the pheasant to hand unscathed, this caused one of the guns to approach the farmer and offer him £500 for Ben but the farmer had to turn it down for obvious reasons. Now with money being tight at the time my Dad said he would of been tempted if he had been there to which the farmer got his cheque book out and offered to buy Ben there and then but my mum insisted we keep him, over the years though he had his moments when my Dad would look at him and think "I could of had £500 for you you ******!"

[Old farrier]

Hi

Good luck with the new dog 😊

All the best

Of

[Tony G]

Best of luck with the dog Anser Hours of fun ahead !

[oowee]

Good luck with new dog. Lets have a PICTURE

[Penelope]

Good luck with the new dog R.

[TONY R]

Well done on the new dog may you have many long happy years together.

[anser2]

Sorry oowee, just been playing with photos , but PW does not seem to like my software so no photos.

[subsonicnat]

Come on,puppy pictures, I love to show the misse`s..

[fenboy]

Some pics from anser2.

He has no pics of the pup yet but these are some of his current dog Meg and some of his past dogs , that you may have read some story's of.

 

Meg with a young Whitefront.

 

Penny the Goldie.

 

Honey with a big canada.

 

And finally his first proper gundog Tunkie .

[muncher]

Good luck Robert ,I have a new dog im training and he is turning into a real challenge, im not sure if he is very dumb or I have lost the ability to train him then again I have never had a field trial pedigree pup so that might be the reason !

[JDog]

Good luck with your new dog.

[fenboy]

Good luck Robert ,I have a new dog im training and he is turning into a real challenge, im not sure if he is very dumb or I have lost the ability to train him then again I have never had a field trial pedigree pup so that might be the reason !

 

Nothing like a challenge Jules

Drake has come on really well but just needs some on the job experience when I get to shoot a few pigeons , he had a couple of trips down the marsh at the end of the season but I never got a shot , he just curled up and went to sleep behind me.

[oxfordfowler]

Good luck with the Pup.

 

Just sorted myself out a new Lab pup as well. Will be the proud owner of a 8 week old black Lab bitch from the 31st.

 

 

 

 

[muncher]

Nothing like a challenge Jules

Drake has come on really well but just needs some on the job experience when I get to shoot a few pigeons , he had a couple of trips down the marsh at the end of the season but I never got a shot , he just curled up and went to sleep behind me.

I like to have them with them me ,but he will come round eventually.but he is a challenge

[fenboy]

I like to have them with them me ,but he will come round eventually.but he is a challenge

 

They can take a lot longer to mature than a bitch as a rule , he cant be much more challenging than Milo was !

[malmick]

All the very best with Pip, you sound like you've got the experience to get the best out of him.

[anser2]

I guess the photos need a bit of an explanation. As yet no pictures of the new pup , but the first photo shows Meg in her younger days with her first white front she retrieved in the Yare Valley Norfolk. It was a bit of luck really. We had been out after the whitefronts on a meadow they had been feeding on for weeks. Of course on the morning I flighted them only pinks came and I left those for fear of scaring the hoped for white fronts. After a number of skeins of pinks had come and gone I was ready to pack up. A pair of mallard had dropped into a dyke a few hundred yards away so rather than have a blank morning I tried to stalk them , but they must have flown off unnoticed as I could not find them. As I was walking back to my hide a goose call made me look up and a trio of white fronts came sailing over head. They were very high, but I was loaded with hevi- shot and chanced a barrel at them. I cut one out as clean as a whistle and I can remember thinking I should have attempted a right and left, Something I have only managed twice at white fronted geese.

 

Meg has featured in many of the yarns I have posted on here. She is by far the most disobedient dog I have ever had , but she is a bag filler and never gives up on any retrieve . A nightmare on a driven shoot , but a blessing on a wild nights fowling. She has a knack of making impossible retrieves from raging waters or catching wounded geese 1\2 a mile away across winding creeks with running tides. There were two long retrieves she made when friends dogs had failed this winter, indeed its becoming a standard Joke with my friends when they thought a bird had been lost to call Meg to do “her stuff”.

 

The second photo is of Penny my lovely old golden retriever. I guess all of us have one dog in our lifetime that is special and Penny is mine. We bonded far closer than any of my other dogs and somehow she could read my mind. As a wildfowling dog she was a first bouncer dog off as soon as a bird started to fall ( I know some disagree , but for me that is not a serious fault in a fowling dog,) but on a pheasant peg she was as steady as a rock , not retrieving unless sent.

This photo was taken when she was quite an old girl. Her final solo flight came after a sudden change in the weather. After a mild spell it became much colder and the forecasters were giving snow within a day or two. But today there were little bunches of mallard all over the marsh during the afternoon tide so with a stiff north east wind I deemed it was going to be worth a morning flight. It was only a short walk to where I intended to do the flight so I gave the old golden retriever , now in her 14th year just one more flight. She is really retired now apart from the odd day in a pigeon hide , but their were no creeks where I intended to hide so the retrieves should not be too hard.

Dawn came early , across the clear sky, but showing a red tinge that might forecast rain later in the day. For an age nothing moved , then a trickle of gulls threaded up the channel , the flight had started. Of the duck just one pair came , arrowing in off the channel. They were high , too high my reason told me , but the magnum and hevi shot knew better and one duck stopped its flight and fell so slowly in the way high birds seem to always seem to , onto the sea wall behind .The old dog was off like a shot marking the bird well and quickly brought it to hand. As I took it from her I reflected this was the end of her 13th season and this may be the last mallard she would ever retrieve.

 

We have had a lot of fun together over those 13 years as I have watched her grow from a mischievous puppy to , perhaps the best gun dog I have ever had. There were days in the early years when I despaired with her , like the time when after having retrieved her first white front she advanced the attack on the next bunch , running a hundred yards out onto the sands to meet them. They responded in swooping low and mobbing her. A quick recall whistle and she galloped back bringing the geese with her and giving me my second goose of the morning . Some hounds are just born lucky. Then later the same day we were a few miles down the coast in the high dunes awaiting the evening flight but still basking in the late afternoon sunshine when a couple of hundred pinks came off the fields passing high overhead. One fell to my shot , to fall behind the dune where unknown to me a group of bird watchers had stopped to watch those same geese. The pink had dropped right in the middle of the group and Penny racing over the dune muscled the birders out the way picked the goose and galloped back to me with it as bold as brass. I was less brave and kept my head down until they moved on.

In her final year Penny was still having some light work, most often from a pigeon hide and the last time she visited the saltmarshes the three of us ( Meg was with us ) tucked ourselves under the bank of a big creek one wet September evening. A single mallard shot out of the darkness and I dropped it well behind across a wide mud pan. Penny gazed after Meg as she ran off to retrieve, and when the duck was laid down beside us she muzzled it feathers snorting as they tickled her nose. I think she knew as did I that her shooting days were over . It was her last flight on the marsh and two months she passed away leaving a huge empty hole in my life.

.

. Getting a new dog is never easy and the right dog never seems to be about when you need one and once you do get one suitable dogs start appearing all over the place. I finally tracked down a red bitch in Suffolk.

When I bought honey I was told she had been used for the last three years for picking up so I presumed she was used to gun fire. But I was could not have been more wrong. At the first shot I fired at a pigeon she burst out of the hide and ran home for me to find her quivering on her bed. I soon found she was not just scared of gunfire, she also was nervous of the gun itself. It took a lot of time and patience to get her use to the sound of gunfire.

 

September saw me out with a friend on his fresh marsh in the Broads and this was to be make or break day for her. I sat Honey a hundred yards off in some reeds , but there were few duck about and I never fired a shot. After flight I set off to walk any duck there were on the marsh out of the dykes. I gave Honey a new freedom and let her quest ten yards in front as I worked my way around the marsh. Just on a sharp bend on a dyke three mallard jumped up. Honey stood her ground as they climbed away her eyes riveted on the birds. I swung the gun on the first bird and it fell into the water with a big splash , a second birds plummeted into the reeds on the bank. In a flash Honey was onto the first bird now swimming strongly, Moments later she handed it to me and on my command I sent her for the second duck which she retrieved faultlessly return. She had no time to think about the shot , just a falling bird and in that moment she was a changed dog. True it taught her to run in , but I could live with that.

. A month later I felt she was safe to take on a club canada goose cull. Shots distant and close rang out all over the place , but she met the sounds with excitement now in the hopes of a retrieve. That morning she retrieved her first goose , followed by several more topped of by a great retrieve on a wounded Canada goose legging it across the marsh. Dashing after it she jumped up snatching the goose out of the air as it just managed to get air bourn , galloped back with it and then in one leap clearing a gate as if she had been doing it all her life. These were the first of many hundreds of geese she retrieved over her lifetime and indeed she became by far the best goose dog I have ever owned.

 

My first real gundog was Tunkie a yellow Labrador. I think she taught me more about dogs than I taught her about retrieving. My parents found her in a little pet shot in Kings Lynn and she quickly settled down to life with me. I went about her training all wrong and her first experience of wildfowling was to be taken out one evening onto a flooded stubble . I had only had her two days. . Though her real passion was moorhen hunting , she would retrieve anything , Pheasants, pigeons off the stubbles , she loved rabbits, duck from the river , waders from the tide line , even crows , but she was never too keen on geese. She would retrieve them when asked , but thought they were too heavy to hang on to after she bought them back , but never thought they were the thing to hang onto when master was about. She nearly came unstuck one morning on the Wash. It had been a foul morning of gales and driving snow . I had just dropped one goose that was flew past a yard above the mud when a dozen of pinks appeared out of the murk heading straight for me. The first bird was an easy shot and Tunkie was off before it hit the mud. Swinging onto a second goose , that to crumpled and almost hit Tunkie as she was racing for the first bird. A wing brushed her head as it smacked into the marsh beside her. Undeterred she retrieved both geese and slipped back into our tiny creek ready for the next skein. We learnt our trade together and for well over a decade she was my constant companion on field, marsh and saltings.

Edited March 21, 2016 by anser2

[anser2]

Oxfordfowler she looks the part. I wish I could have a pup from a young age , but being single I cant leave a dog at home all day so need to have a dog that I can take to work with me , be old enough to leave in the car for a short while with out it chewing up the seats and be big enough to walk around my reserve for several hours. I wish you well with her.

[Ttfjlc]

I guess the photos need a bit of an explanation. As yet no pictures of the new pup , but the first photo shows Meg in her younger days with her first white front she retrieved in the Yare Valley Norfolk. It was a bit of luck really. We had been out after the whitefronts on a meadow they had been feeding on for weeks. Of course on the morning I flighted them only pinks came and I left those for fear of scaring the hoped for white fronts. After a number of skeins of pinks had come and gone I was ready to pack up. A pair of mallard had dropped into a dyke a few hundred yards away so rather than have a blank morning I tried to stalk them , but they must have flown off unnoticed as I could not find them. As I was walking back to my hide a goose call made me look up and a trio of white fronts came sailing over head. They were very high, but I was loaded with hevi- shot and chanced a barrel at them. I cut one out as clean as a whistle and I can remember thinking I should have attempted a right and left, Something I have only managed twice at white fronted geese.

 

Meg has featured in many of the yarns I have posted on here. She is by far the most disobedient dog I have ever had , but she is a bag filler and never gives up on any retrieve . A nightmare on a driven shoot , but a blessing on a wild nights fowling. She has a knack of making impossible retrieves from raging waters or catching wounded geese 1\2 a mile away across winding creeks with running tides. There were two long retrieves she made when friends dogs had failed this winter, indeed its becoming a standard Joke with my friends when they thought a bird had been lost to call Meg to do “her stuff”.

 

The second photo is of Penny my lovely old golden retriever. I guess all of us have one dog in our lifetime that is special and Penny is mine. We bonded far closer than any of my other dogs and somehow she could read my mind. As a wildfowling dog she was a first bouncer dog off as soon as a bird started to fall ( I know some disagree , but for me that is not a serious fault in a fowling dog,) but on a pheasant peg she was as steady as a rock , not retrieving unless sent.

This photo was taken when she was quite an old girl. Her final solo flight came after a sudden change in the weather. After a mild spell it became much colder and the forecasters were giving snow within a day or two. But today there were little bunches of mallard all over the marsh during the afternoon tide so with a stiff north east wind I deemed it was going to be worth a morning flight. It was only a short walk to where I intended to do the flight so I gave the old golden retriever , now in her 14th year just one more flight. She is really retired now apart from the odd day in a pigeon hide , but their were no creeks where I intended to hide so the retrieves should not be too hard.

Dawn came early , across the clear sky, but showing a red tinge that might forecast rain later in the day. For an age nothing moved , then a trickle of gulls threaded up the channel , the flight had started. Of the duck just one pair came , arrowing in off the channel. They were high , too high my reason told me , but the magnum and hevi shot knew better and one duck stopped its flight and fell so slowly in the way high birds seem to always seem to , onto the sea wall behind .The old dog was off like a shot marking the bird well and quickly brought it to hand. As I took it from her I reflected this was the end of her 13th season and this may be the last mallard she would ever retrieve.

 

We have had a lot of fun together over those 13 years as I have watched her grow from a mischievous puppy to , perhaps the best gun dog I have ever had. There were days in the early years when I despaired with her , like the time when after having retrieved her first white front she advanced the attack on the next bunch , running a hundred yards out onto the sands to meet them. They responded in swooping low and mobbing her. A quick recall whistle and she galloped back bringing the geese with her and giving me my second goose of the morning . Some hounds are just born lucky. Then later the same day we were a few miles down the coast in the high dunes awaiting the evening flight but still basking in the late afternoon sunshine when a couple of hundred pinks came off the fields passing high overhead. One fell to my shot , to fall behind the dune where unknown to me a group of bird watchers had stopped to watch those same geese. The pink had dropped right in the middle of the group and Penny racing over the dune muscled the birders out the way picked the goose and galloped back to me with it as bold as brass. I was less brave and kept my head down until they moved on.

In her final year Penny was still having some light work, most often from a pigeon hide and the last time she visited the saltmarshes the three of us ( Meg was with us ) tucked ourselves under the bank of a big creek one wet September evening. A single mallard shot out of the darkness and I dropped it well behind across a wide mud pan. Penny gazed after Meg as she ran off to retrieve, and when the duck was laid down beside us she muzzled it feathers snorting as they tickled her nose. I think she knew as did I that her shooting days were over . It was her last flight on the marsh and two months she passed away leaving a huge empty hole in my life.

.

. Getting a new dog is never easy and the right dog never seems to be about when you need one and once you do get one suitable dogs start appearing all over the place. I finally tracked down a red bitch in Suffolk.

When I bought honey I was told she had been used for the last three years for picking up so I presumed she was used to gun fire. But I was could not have been more wrong. At the first shot I fired at a pigeon she burst out of the hide and ran home for me to find her quivering on her bed. I soon found she was not just scared of gunfire, she also was nervous of the gun itself. It took a lot of time and patience to get her use to the sound of gunfire.

 

September saw me out with a friend on his fresh marsh in the Broads and this was to be make or break day for her. I sat Honey a hundred yards off in some reeds , but there were few duck about and I never fired a shot. After flight I set off to walk any duck there were on the marsh out of the dykes. I gave Honey a new freedom and let her quest ten yards in front as I worked my way around the marsh. Just on a sharp bend on a dyke three mallard jumped up. Honey stood her ground as they climbed away her eyes riveted on the birds. I swung the gun on the first bird and it fell into the water with a big splash , a second birds plummeted into the reeds on the bank. In a flash Honey was onto the first bird now swimming strongly, Moments later she handed it to me and on my command I sent her for the second duck which she retrieved faultlessly return. She had no time to think about the shot , just a falling bird and in that moment she was a changed dog. True it taught her to run in , but I could live with that.

. A month later I felt she was safe to take on a club canada goose cull. Shots distant and close rang out all over the place , but she met the sounds with excitement now in the hopes of a retrieve. That morning she retrieved her first goose , followed by several more topped of by a great retrieve on a wounded Canada goose legging it across the marsh. Dashing after it she jumped up snatching the goose out of the air as it just managed to get air bourn , galloped back with it and then in one leap clearing a gate as if she had been doing it all her life. These were the first of many hundreds of geese she retrieved over her lifetime and indeed she became by far the best goose dog I have ever owned.

 

My first real gundog was Tunkie a yellow Labrador. I think she taught me more about dogs than I taught her about retrieving. My parents found her in a little pet shot in Kings Lynn and she quickly settled down to life with me. I went about her training all wrong and her first experience of wildfowling was to be taken out one evening onto a flooded stubble . I had only had her two days. . Though her real passion was moorhen hunting , she would retrieve anything , Pheasants, pigeons off the stubbles , she loved rabbits, duck from the river , waders from the tide line , even crows , but she was never too keen on geese. She would retrieve them when asked , but thought they were too heavy to hang on to after she bought them back , but never thought they were the thing to hang onto when master was about. She nearly came unstuck one morning on the Wash. It had been a foul morning of gales and driving snow . I had just dropped one goose that was flew past a yard above the mud when a dozen of pinks appeared out of the murk heading straight for me. The first bird was an easy shot and Tunkie was off before it hit the mud. Swinging onto a second goose , that to crumpled and almost hit Tunkie as she was racing for the first bird. A wing brushed her head as it smacked into the marsh beside her. Undeterred she retrieved both geese and slipped back into our tiny creek ready for the next skein. We learnt our trade together and for well over a decade she was my constant companion on field, marsh and saltings.

 

A thoroughly enjoyable read, thanks for sharing.

[oowee]

Thank you anser a great story of some great companions.