Baby Halos’ First Bird Day!

Louie, Cheeky, and Maggie getting after their first chukar!

It’s an exciting week for us.  Maggie’s parents are headed down to USDAA Agility Nationals, aka, Cynosport, in Arizona, and we had arranged to keep Maggie while they were gone.  With Maggie at our house, and a “free” weekend, it seemed like the perfect time to get the babies on birds.  After all, the Baby Halos are now 10 weeks old and some bird exposure seemed prudent.

The puppies also agreed that we needed to get them on birds — they thought it was super cool!

Luckily, we were able to round up a bunch of friends — Tyler & Hilary with their V, Tioga.  Tioga’s dad is Zeke (Karma’s littermate brother) and Tyler is like a little brother to Jenny.  He went to the Air Force Academy with her brother, Chad, and played on the golf team with them.  Tyler moved back a couple years ago to help coach the Academy golf team, and we’ve loved having him close!  Now that he has a Vizsla it’s even better!  Bo & Louie were also able to make it and brought Jade too.  Jade was only exposed to birds once as a young pup, so we were excited to see what she thought about them now.  Tad was babysitting Fin (another Kai kid) and his two boys, Kai and Gus.  Finally, our group was rounded out by Josh & Jax.  Josh is another Academy grab, but rather than owning Vizslas, he has two yellow labs!  That made our group 1 Toy Poodle, 2 Labs, and 9 Vizslas!

Tioga seeing if Uncle Marc is impressed with his retrieving.

The puppies were so fun to watch!  First, we exposed them all the the bird at once.  They were so excited.  Since we had some decent drive to work with, we split them into one-on-one interactions with the bird.

A three-way point meant everyone understood the game and it was time to split up the litter antics.

Maggie was first, and typical of our birdiest girl, she was a rockstar.  She did one pounce, the bird popped and then she worked out standing her birds from a few steps back.  So proud of her.  When we met Byron he said his biggest priority was to have have a bird dog and that his wife would likely end up doing agility with the pup too.  Seeing Maggie on birds today, we know that she is just what he ordered up.  We can’t wait to watch her and Byron turn into a team in the field.

Louie also had some light bulbs turn on.  In our experience, they boys are always a bit slower to mature, so we were thrilled to see Louie figuring out how to point and not rush in on the birds.  It was also super fun to watch his big sister Jade figure out the bird thing.  She had the BIGGEST smile on her face!  We are excited to watch both of these bird dogs figure out this game!

Finally, our Cheeky took the field.  She was great!  She figured out how to point and started working out her retrieve.  She started by only picking up the birds by the head, but figured out the body was a better hold.  We were surprised she made the effort as we were working with chukar and they were almost as big as her!  But she did it!  She also worked a bit on her stop to flush skills, and even had a natural stop to flush later in the day!

So proud of our baby bird dogs and can’t wait until our next training day!