Snow Goose Dogs
"You just can't train for that kind of stuff."

written by Butch Goodwin
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Northern Flight Retrievers  

When my friend Jeff Hajjar invited me to join him on his spring snow goose-hunting trip to Missouri, the very first question I asked was whether he was going to take his Labrador or if I should plan to take one of my Chesapeakes. He said that we didn't have to take a dog - the guide would have one. I think I must have looked at him out of the corner of my eye - Jeff knew I wasn't happy about hunting with a 
dog I wasn't familiar with. 

Over the past 30 years or so, I don't believe that I have ever done any form of bird hunting when I didn't have one of my dogs along. Sure, occasionally we used a hunting partner's dog and mine stayed in the truck, but one of my dogs has always been with me and available should he be needed to work. Heading to Missouri to shoot geese without a dog in tow was a bit like not bringing my own shotgun: I felt like a part of me was missing. 

I have hunted with too many good dogs over the years to put up with one that is out of control. Call me a "dog snob" if you want - I'm really not - I just believe that dogs need to be in control and not make a hunting trip miserable, especially when we were going so far from home and expecting to have a good time. I knew we could depend on Jeffs Lab to get the job done, and I would have felt very comfortable having him along; I also knew that my male Chesapeake could handle the geese - but both of them were sitting in their kennels in Idaho. It was an uneasy feeling. 

When we met our guide, Mike McMann, on the first morning, I was more interested in visiting with his Labrador, who was curled up on the truck seat next to him, than I was in hearing how many geese his clients had killed over the last few days. And, when he put us in our layout blinds in a six-degree, 40-mile-per-hour driving blizzard, I looked around for the dog, which was nowhere to be found. He was still curled up on the seat of the truck where it was warm! (Was this dog smarter than I anticipated?) 

In the gray pre-dawn light the following morning, as we were gathering our gear into our layout blinds, I watched as Hunter climbed into his nylon pop-up blind without being told and sat very still, continually scanning the sky. Then, as volley after volley of shots were fired and geese rained down in all directions, we never even knew he was there. During one of the lulls in the shooting, Mike climbed out of his layout blind and hollered at his dog to go find the birds. 

There was no standing in place and running the dog on individual marks or handling him to downed birds - it was Mike and his dog walking around and scouring the field to pick up all of the birds that had fallen, recovering the cripples first. Some of the birds had fallen or crawled off into small pockets of brush, and I don't think they would have ever been found without a dog. Some had sailed behind us on the back­side of a small hill, and while Mike made adjustments to the windsocks and blinds to match the shifting wind, Hunter took off on his own, searched over the hill, and brought back several birds. 

It would have been totally impossible for him to mark all of the birds as they dropped - there were regularly at least a dozen or more falling at the same time, and they were white birds disappearing against a white back­ground onto a snow-covered field among hundreds of fluttering white windsock decoys. A couple of times I looked over from my blind and watched him while my hunting partners were still shooting. I noticed that he didn't watch individual birds all the way to the ground; he seemed to watch the direction that birds fell or sailed off and then shifted his gaze to watch where another was 
falling. When it came time to pick them up, he knew that there was a bird or several birds in a particular area, and off he went to that area to hunt them out. 

Once we had a couple of wing-tipped cripples glide out onto a frozen farm pond. I was trying to watch where they landed from my blind but lost them against the white background. Again, when it was time to pick up the geese, Hunter had watched them and knew those geese were out there and made a couple of trips onto the ice, hunted around, and recovered them. 

I was pretty impressed, and my apprehension about hunting with an in-experienced dog was erased. This dog knew his stuff. 

The shooting slowed considerably during the middle of the day, and I took the opportunity to ask Mike about what kind of training he had done with his dog. He explained that all he had taught him was to get into the dog blind, stay there, and remain still through all of the shooting and geese falling all around - sometimes even bouncing off the top of the blind. Mike said that with hundreds of pairs of eyes looking down from above, luring the geese in close totally depended on staying concealed and remaining absolutely motionless. He also said that when Hunter was young he would take him out and tell him to "hunt 'em up" to get him to use his nose and find the dead birds. 

Mike said that the only training Hunter got now was three months or so every year picking up geese seven days a week, starting in the south and following the birds' migration north through several states all the way into the Dakotas. He explained that every day is a new field, with a new group of hunters and a new set of conditions to deal with. 

"You just can't train for that kind of stuff," Mike said. "Hunter picks up more geese some days than most dogs do in a lifetime - his training comes from a combination of instinct and lots of on-the-job experience." 

All I can say to that was, "Amen."  

To see how Butch teaches a dog to hunt and remain steady from a pop-up blind, check out his column in the August/September 2004 issue.