Silence is golden

[AlaskaHunter]

Silence is important when chasing late season roosters, huns, chuckars, etc. Easy to teach a lab to hunt with silent handling.
I use the vibrate function on the E-collar to silently sit the lab once she gets birdy.
I then circle around into blocking position and then silently release the lab with a hand signal to track the rooster towards my position.

 

[crock239]

Silence is important when chasing late season roosters, huns, chuckars, etc. Easy to teach a lab to hunt with silent handling.
I use the vibrate function on the E-collar to silently sit the lab once she gets birdy.
I then circle around into blocking position and then silently release the lab with a hand signal to track the rooster towards my position.
View attachment 233779

Interesting. I've definitely worked on hand signals with my lab, and for now am using mouth whistle rather than loud training whistle...so, could see deploying a similar tactic in the future on hunts.

We're not there yet, just hoping to get some more experience on birds this fall, which will be our first full season.

I way underestimated the bond that develops when training your own hunting dog / partner -- it is pretty awesome.

Thanks for sharing this idea...

 

[El Jason]

I use the beep in my Garmin for a recall command. One day Finn showed he was about 75 yards from me in some of the steepest stuff imaginable. I beeped him to get the hell out of there and as soon as I did a covey of chukars bailed out of the rocks above him.

Good advice, although I don’t find sound to be nearly as critical for chukars. However, I typically hunt where there’s pretty good grass cover, which I think makes it much less important and relevant.

 

[AlaskaHunter]

I use the beep in my Garmin for a recall command. One day Finn showed he was about 75 yards from me in some of the steepest stuff imaginable. I beeped him to get the hell out of there and as soon as I did a covey of chukars bailed out of the rocks above him.

Good advice, although I don’t find sound to be nearly as critical for chukars. However, I typically hunt where there’s pretty good grass cover, which I think makes it much less important and relevant.

With open country huns and chuckars I try to approach quietly and out of sight.

If the lab is tracking up a steep slope, I silently let her go way out of gun range as the chuckars will flush down overhead.
With chukars I also often would get a flush peaking over the top of a hill or rimrock with the lab at heel.

With huns the covey often flushes out of range and it I can locate where they land,
they typically walk up hill, so I try to circle around and behind a ridge and get ready
with the lab at heel for a flush when I pop over the top of the ridge above where the covey landed.
It the covey does not flush, I silently release the lab to track into the area the covey landed.
With huns in the hills I hunt the hard part is marking where the covey landed as they often
flush and fly around a hillslope so precise location is not possible.