Steve Snell’s Gundog Blog

Well, first day of upland bird hunting.  I’ve been on a couple of goose hunts, but today was the first day we got the hounds out and chased after some upland game.

We are in North Central, Kansas chasing prairie chickens.  We are up here with Ted and John and a couple of their buddies.  I got in around 10:30 or 11 this morning and finally hooked up with them.  They hunted this morning and I caught up with them at lunch.

After lunch we went out and ran Click and Dottie.  I’m real happy with how both of them did.

Dottie is doing real well.  She just had a little surgery and she is showing no signs of that slowing her down.  Click had a real nice run on a big chunk of land. He covered it really well.  We had a little bit of bird work; not exactly what I was looking for, but they did OK.

Scenting conditions were good, but the wind was blowing about 30 miles an hour.  The temperature was real nice.  It was low 60’s and overcast.  I actually got to run dogs the rest of the afternoon and got everybody on the ground for a little bit.

I ran Sage and Stud together.  I’m real pleased with Stud.  He ran big, but he turned easy. I was actually able to back down on his stimulation setting on his collar after the first couple of corrections.  I noticed he really was not fighting me, so we backed him down.

He is the only dog that I have that uses the high stimulation collar on the SportDOG Remote Training Collars.   One of the things that I like about the Sport Dog 1825 and the Sport Dog 1225 is that not only do you have variable intensity settings at the transmitter, you also have a variable collar.  It’s the only one of its kind.

Dogtra has a similar function on its Dogtra 3500 unit that allows you the option of making a universal change on the transmitter between low and high stimulation.  The difference here is that I’m able to change only Stud’s collar so that when I give him a correction, he gets a different stimulation on the same number than the other dog does that is wearing a medium stim coll

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So that’s  unique in the e-collar market.  What you do with that is you have three different stimulation settings at the collar. You have a low stim, a medium stim, and then a high stim.  It comes out of the box on the medium stim.  Medium Stim is going to work for 90% of the dogs out there.  There will be a few dogs that need less and a few dogs that need more.

Stud is one of those dogs that just requires an enormous amount of stimulation.  We switched him up to the high stim collar last year.  Four to 5 was normal for him last year.  Sometimes it would take a 5 out of a possible 8 to get him to turn.  That’s a lot of stimulation, but he’s just a really tough, hardheaded dog.  The stimulation just doesn’t bother him.

Last year I backed him down, and it was more like a high stim 3 or a 4 toward the end of the season.

Today, I started on a high stim 3, and I noticed that he was reacting to it very quickly, so we backed down to a 2 and it worked great.

I’m pretty excited to see that.  He’s very interested in being with me and going the direction that I’m going.  I had a couple of situations where he would turn and be heading in the right direction, and something would catch his attention and move back.

He’s one of my Astro dogs.  I watch him on the map on the Garmin Astro, and I turn him when I have to.  What I love about the map on the Garmin Astro is that when he makes the turn, I can actually see it, and I can see him coming back to me.

It’s not uncommon for him to make 400 yard casts. 400 yards is a little much for a foot dog.  He’s really a horseback dog, but I hunt him off foot.  He likes to make 400 yard casts.  I am more of a 250 yard kind of guy.

He’s my biggest running dog right now.  The combination of being able to turn him with a collar and being able to watch him with the Astro works really well.  Considering that we haven’t done much in the off season, I was pleased with where he was at the end of the year last year.  It looks like we may just be able to pick right up and start again.

So everybody looked good.  The weather was nice.  We didn’t get into a lot of birds, but we got a little bit of bird work.  It was just a good start to the year.  I’m real excited about it.  It looks like we’re going to have a nice chilly morning.  We’re going to hunt here about half a day and the head north.  I’m looking forward to it.

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