2008 Hunting Season Wrap Up

2008 Hunting Season Wrap Up

It was an interesting season. Started out hot and then switched to pretty cold over the course of a week. Not many nice 45 degree days where you didn’t have to worry about the dogs getting hot or me getting cold....

We got the most Pheasants we’ve ever gotten for a single season. Just a couple of Ruffed Grouse though.

The dogs did pretty well. Marge, English Setter, was just over 12 years old at the start of the season and held up well. She wants to hunt like she is in her prime so I have to hold her back a bit these days. Fergie, Pointer. was 10 1/2 years old and is mostly blind. She still loves to hunt and would work hard. She didn’t get as many chances at birds since I usually ran the two English Setters first and sometimes we would fill out before she would get to hunt. We would fake hunt most of the time. She did get some hen points but it was on the last hunt of the season that she got a rock solid rooster hunt so that was a blast. Tina, English Setter, turned six shortly before the season. We added her to the team two weeks before our first hunt of the season. She did really well on the grouse the one weekend that we hunted them. It was her first time on pheasants and it was a little bit of an adjustment but she came along fast and was locking them solid by the end of the season.

We hunted a fair number of different farms this fall but did have a few favorites that we hit a bit more often. The new ones were also some of the farthest ones away. One was by Springfield MN and one was by Montevideo MN. Only hunted in Minnesota this year. I used to usually hunt in three different states and hope to expand out a bit more again next year.

The big new piece of gear that I got was a Garmin Astro dog tracking unit. It worked really well and I used it to find dogs that had wandered a bit farther than usual. I think it gave me a bit more confidence to let the dogs stretch out their range a little bit farther. If I was running two dogs I used two of the tracking collars and it made it easier to follow one dog that might be working scent without having to worry about where the other dogs was at any one moment. If they were out of sound range with the remote locate on their beeper collar I would just pull out the receiver unit and it would point me in the right direction. It was a good purchase.

All in all it was a good season and the dogs had a good time and I had a blast hunting with them, which are the two most important parts of it anyway.