It’s bird hunting season on the High Desert. Once again, hunters and their dogs take to the fields in the time-honored effort to place some savory game on the dinner table.

Bird dogs find, flush and retrieve downed game for the hunter. The two basic types of bird dogs are pointers, which are trained to locate and point at the game without flushing it, and retrievers, which find and then flush the game on command. Both types of gun dogs retrieve downed birds.

So how do the dogs know what to do?

Bird dogs have been bred for hundreds of years to sharpen their hunting instincts, but instinct alone is not enough. They must also be trained into their partnership with the hunter, often by professionals who know the breeds intimately.

Two of Central Oregon’s pre-eminent bird-dog trainers agree on the fundamental principles of training bird dogs but differ on many of the details.

Tim Curry, owner of Central Oregon Sporting Dogs of Tumalo, is the only Orvis-certified bird dog trainer in the Pacific Northwest and specializes in training pointers, particularly his own purebred German shorthairs.

Doug Koellermeier owns Tarah Kennels of Bend and judged retriever field trials for the American Kennel Club and hunting tests for the North American Hunting Retriever Association for more than 20 years before he decided to focus exclusively on breeding and training his purebred Labrador retrievers in 2009.

And just what makes a good bird dog?

Curry and Koellermeier agree: Breeding is the critical first ingredient for both pointers and retrievers.

“You can’t insert instinct that isn’t there,” Curry said. “You can take an average-bred dog and make it OK, but if you want an excellent bird dog, blood lines are key.”

Curry likes to breed dogs with championship blood lines going back five generations, but Koellermeier feels three generations are enough.

“It’s like a person saying, ‘My great-great-great grandfather was president of the United States,’” Koellermeier said. “Great! So how much of those presidential qualities did you inherit?”

Both look for the exceptional dogs in every litter. But even with five generations’ breeding, Curry says, “Out of a whole litter, two might be kennel or field trial dogs. The rest will be good family companions as well as good bird dogs.”

Both agree: Dogs have unique personalities and temperaments that trainers need to consider when training them.

“Bird dogs are just like people; they’re all different,” Koellermeier said. “There’s not just one way to train a dog. You need to get inside the dog’s head to see what it’s made of.”

Commands for obedience training should be taught apart from commands for hunting, as the dogs may get confused and be reprimanded for the wrong action at the wrong time, both said.

“We never want dogs to think birds are a bad thing,” Curry said.

Food rewards are counterproductive in training bird dogs, they said. Hunters need their dogs to follow their commands in the field by sight and sound without expecting a treat every time they do their job properly.

The point is …

But how does the training of pointers and retrievers differ?

“All dogs have a ‘pause before they pounce’ instinct,” Curry said. “That’s all a point is. Some dogs (are bred to) have more than others.”

“The most important command (a pointer) is ever going to learn is ‘whoa,’” Curry said, which is meant to keep the dog on point when it locates a bird until the hunter flushes it. Curry uses a “launcher,” which conceals a live pigeon in the grass that can be remotely released by the trainer.

“Untrained pointers will point a bird for a certain amount of time, then rush it and flush it, which is normal,” he said. “If they keep rushing, I keep launching (as many times as it takes) until they self-train to point and hold.” This is the most intense aspect of training pointers, he said.

In contrast, “sit” is single most important command to retrievers, but for essentially the same reason. It is the prelude to flushing the bird or making the retrieve.

Training dogs to retrieve birds, especially waterfowl, can be extensive. Dogs can be expected to mentally “mark” where individual birds fall, to make multiple retrieves in a single outing and to make a “blind retrieve” guided only by the hunter’s signals when the dog doesn’t know where the bird has fallen.

There has been a recent movement to train pointing retrievers, the “all in one dog,” Koellermeier says. But unless a retriever shows a natural tendency to point on its own, trying to train the dog to point is “going against the genetic make-up of that particular dog.”

Curry goes even further. As a hunting-dog purist, he believes training retrievers to point produces a mediocre dog in both dimensions.

In the end, the trainers agree: Rewards of praise and affection are much more effective than food bribes or punishment.

“It’s been said there’s only one thing two bird-dog trainers can agree about and that’s that the third trainer doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Curry said with a smile.

Resources

Tim Curry, Central Oregon Sporting Dogs, www.oregonsportingdog.com.

Doug Koellermeier, Tarah Kennels, 541-419-7315.