Houston and Quail?
Who says we don’t have quail in Houston? We spend probably 1 to 2 days per week wandering the Coastal Prairie. Believe it or not there are wild quail in Houston. The video is pretty typical of how we quail hunt. You’ll see her start flash pointing (which was my signal to get the gun … or camera out in this case), after which she starts stalking and pointing as she gets closer. The tail and her pace are what I use to start figuring out when I should start getting ready with the gun. Usually she is sprinting back and forth searching. Once she gets more intentional, and starting/stopping I know she’s on birds. She’ll point about half the time and she’s flushing about half the time. I haven’t bothered much with steadiness training, or I feel pretty confident I could get points consistently. My dog previous to this was a springer spaniel, pointing was never super high on my list. My bigger priorities are finding birds (in gun range), and retrieving cripples, which she excels at.
Pointing
Yep. She points. Here’s what it looks like when she does it. Once again - wild quail in Houston Texas.
Retrieving
So unfortunately I don’t have permission to hunt the quail on the land we walk. So most of our actual hunting in the Houston area is ducks over ponds. She’s solid in water and has no issues with retrieves. While she’s no lab, she’s no slouch in the water.
Tracking
Tracking is probably her best subject… unfortunately we don’t get to use it too often on big game. I only shoot about 1 deer per year, and generally that deer isn’t going very far. But for anybody that has hit a deer solid and then spent the next 8 hours tracking, crawling under brush, looking around the pitch black with a crappy flashlight under thick brush you know the value of a dog. (The last deer I shot managed to go 25 yards… and yet it took me 10 hours to find due to lack of daylight and me shooting from prone and not knowing exactly where it went. That will teach me not to bring Honey :/ That deer would have been found in 10 seconds.)
Training
We spent the first year of her life training her. This is how much time we spent every day training. It’s a little bit less than 5 minutes of your life per day. If a 12 year old and an 8 year old can do it, you can too. I’m not good. But I have found that if you enjoy it and the dog enjoys it, then you end up with pretty good results (not professional level results - but you can get a really solid working dog that lives to please). This is Honey at about 10-12 weeks of age. So at this point we had her for at most about 4 weeks.