It was misting when I got up this morning so I have been going real slow this morning. After a while it quit so I got the puppies second shot ready for them. They will be 9 weeks old tomorrow. When I went out to give the shots a large dark cloud was coming in from the west. I cleaned the older dogs pens because they are easy to get back into their runs. As I started to the house, without turning the puppies loose or cleaning their pen, the rain started coming down. Now I’m sitting in the house listening to the down pour.
Getting the shots ready.
The needle I use to draw the medicine from the vials.
Boss pointing a pigeon.
It probably doesn’t make a lot of difference but when I get the shots ready I use an extra needle to draw the medicine from the bottles. The needle goes through the rubber on the first bottle to draw the liquid out then penetrates another rubber cover to mix the two together. This keeps the needles that come with the shots as sharp as possible. I think a sharp needle hurts the puppies less. I know I can feel it go through the skin and it goes in much easier.
As I said the puppies are 9 weeks old tomorrow and will be going to their new owners soon. Each of them have a distinct personality that I will miss but it’s time for them to go. On one hand I hate to see them go but each one is going to what I think is a good home. The good part, my work load will go down, considerable.
I was going to keep one of the males and had a buyer for the other. I called the buyer and left a message about when they were to pick up their puppy. They were coming by occasionally to play with the puppies. I haven’t heard back from them and it’s been over a week. It’s been over 2 weeks since they came by to play with puppies. I like that little boy really well so it’s not a bad thing. If they don’t call or come by I will have 2 puppies to play with.
Boss has been in South Dakota for 2 months. I picked him up on August the 29th. I’m happy to have him home. He was run on the prairies in front of a horse for 2 months. He looks like he’s in really good shape. Now to get him hunting some where.
I think Boss is happy to be home, too. When he was a puppy and I turned him out to clean his pen I always put him back last. I sat on a cross board in the pen and petted him for a while. When he was real little I held him in my lap but as he grew I made him stand with his feet on the ground. When I let him out the first time, to clean his pen, I sat on the board and called him to me. Before I could react he jumped into my lap. I tried to get a picture but he was too wiggly. After a little while I set him on the ground.
Tomorrow, September the first, is opening day of dove season. It also is opening day of prairie grouse in Nebraska and a lot of other states. I wanted to go to Nebraska but having the puppies is keeping me home. Having 2 puppies, if I do, makes 7 dogs for me, and may keep me home for a while. I need to work the puppies on pigeons, too.
I put this picture of Mann on Hunting With English Setters and had over 300 likes.
Kansas prairie chicken season opens in a couple of weeks so I can make some day trips out there. After the prairie chicken season turkey season opens. Kansas allows you to use dogs in the fall turkey season. This gives us a chance to hunt the walk-in properties to see how the quail are doing. The walk-in book says you can’t run dogs on walk-in. You must be hunting. So I prairie chicken and turkey hunt.
A few years ago I had a couple of good hunts around a lake in Missouri. I went back last year and didn’t find any birds at all. Same area and the habitat didn’t look any different. As I was looking for another area to try I saw some guys that worked on the lake area. I talked to them to see if they had seen any quail. One of the guys said he hadn’t seen a quail in that area in 10 years.
The other guy was a rabbit hunter. He said his beagles had flushed a covey and told me where the area was. He said that was the only covey he had seen on this area. I went where he told me and it looked good but I never found that covey. That’s the way a lot of the information you get from people is. Just a couple of years before I had good hunts but the one guy hadn’t seen a quail in 10 years.
I’m not sure where this one was but it’s November of 2018.
Several times deer hunters have told me where they jumped bunches of quail. When I got there, with several dogs working hard, never found a bird. Word of mouth is not the way to find quail. It takes lots of boot leather.
But I don’t know how many times someone would be coming out of a place I wanted to hunt and would say, “nothing here. We didn’t find a bird”. After they left I would hunt the place and finds birds.
One year in central Kansas I had found a few quail but was looking for a new place. I came by a place and a couple of guys were loading up their dogs. I stopped and talked to them. They told me they had got a covey up and it flew into some CRP next to a soybean field. They said they had tried but didn’t come up with any birds.
The 6 quail from a Kansas quail hunt and the W.R. Pape.
I drove on looking around then decided I would see if I could find their birds. I drove back by and they were still there. I kept driving but circled back in a few minutes and they were gone. I turned the dogs, Dolly and Sally, out. We started along the CRP next to the soybean field.
I had walked about 150 yards when I saw Dolly on point with Sally honoring. When I got in front of her a scattered covey of quail flushed and flew back toward the truck. I killed a bird and Dolly retrieved. I saw Sally pointing almost where the covey had flushed from. I thought she was pointing a hot spot where the quail had been. But I went to her. When I got about even with her a single quail that hadn’t flushed with the rest got up. As usual, when I really want to kill a bird for a young dog, I missed, twice.
Tur Bo, the puppies great grandfather.
Years ago, Dennis Garrison and I almost had a limit of quail each and stopped by a small place to finish. A guy with 2 or 3 dogs was just loading up to leave. We talked to him for a while and he told us there were no birds there. He said, “if there were birds here these dogs would have found them.” We talked for a while and he left. We turned our dogs loose.
We hunted for a while without finding anything. Then we noticed that one of our dogs wasn’t with us. This was before GPS. In fact neither of us even had an e-collar. We started looking for the lost dog and found him on point. He had a covey of quail and if memory serves me right we found another, later. I know we finished our limits.
Bird hunting is like life. If you just work harder than everyone else, good things will happen.