Spring Grouse

When the grouse season is over in Sweden, in the late winter, you can still train the dogs for a couple of weeks if you leave the gun at home. A good substitute is a camera, it is even more difficult to make good shots with it in the strong light we have in the snow-covered mountains this time of the year.

At the around the end of march or the begining of april days are getting longer and the sun shines from high above, starting to warm the hillsides, melting the snow and flooding thousends of small creeks and rivers. The grouse are starting to pair and apparently like to show up for both dogs and human spectators. The weather is unpredictable, a mixture of calm, warm, sunny and increadibly beautyfull days that rapidly can change to rain- or snow storms that takes your breath and can put you in a dangerous situation unless you have some knowledge about how to handle these conditiones.

We started with a 650 kilometer drive to our friends in the north. We had planned this trip for a while, one of its purposes was to cut down our setters ranging that had, due to our neglect of maintaining a firm attitude toward the dog, become extreamly wide during last autum. Wide rangeing dogs are prefered here in the north but the way our setter behaved was more than enough of the good stuff. We also wanted to test our skills as photografers under these conditiones. Our friends wanted to install some obedience into their dogs and steady the younger dog to flushed birds. When we arrived late in the evening some plans were made for the days to come.

The next morning we checked and fitted all the neccessary gear like skiis, rucksacks, boots, clothes, food and emergency equipment and headed for the mountains. The dogs, our English Setter and Springer Spaniel and our friends 2 Irish Setter bitches, were used as pacemakers and were a great help when we climbed up through the woods to the line where the dwarf-birch and the bare mountain meets. The first day was used for obedience training and sightseeing only. Usually even the most soficticated dog is also affected by these wievs and the new scents of the mountains, and it is not a great supprise if it runs compleatly wild the first time in these surroundings. If you can steady them here they will most likely be steady everywhere. So we had a plan in order to install some of this steadyness into our fourlegged friends.

The dogs were let out one by one. The rest of us was placed in a very wide circle around the working handler. After 10 meters they were called back. If the dog did not respond to the handlers signal immideatly we in the circle shouted angryly to the dog until it turned back. If the dog responded we were quiet. Then they were let out again and called back at 20 meters. This was repeated until the dogs turned immidieatly at the whistle at any range. The method worked very well and soon all the dogs understood the unconditional demand of the signal. They were not allowed to do any ranging at all, just to run out and come back at once. They had not experienced such (from their wievpoint, stupid) demands before and soon they where very tired mentally. We took a break after a couple of hours and had some rest and food in the warmth of the sun.

When we left our temporary camp a grouse took to its wings about 15 meters from where we had sat. We were mighty supprised, and so were the dogs.The wind had been steady during the hour we had rested and the dogs never got the scent from the bird dispite of the short distance to it. We hit some more birds (and a few reindeer also) this day, but they were more or less flushed by us, the dogs were not allowed to hunt. Obedience had not yet been secured well enough. In the late evening we were happy to come back to our hut and end the day with a sauna-bath and a genuine dinner.

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