They say English setters don’t always care to retrieve. It’s been my experience that “they” are sometimes right.
I’m two out of three on this fetching business. My first two English setters, Jack and Doll, were both fine retrievers, though they both came to that conclusion following different paths. Jack had a keen interest in birds on the ground, but in the early days of our hunting partnership, he seemed a little unclear on the concept. He found birds on the ground, but just didn’t pick them up. He aggressively pursued wounded birds, however, and while I didn’t quite understand what he was doing, we weren’t losing any birds.
Doll just got it from the get-go.
One day, on a chukar hunt in Idaho, Jack revealed his game. He went on point on a small covey on a steep hillside (geographic description is obviously redundant for chukars). I hit a pair of birds on the flush, one of my first doubles over Jack. One bird fell nearby, while the second flew out over the sagebrush before crash landing. I could see the first, obviously dead chukar, and walked over to pick it up while Jack pursued the bird out front.
Jack was a big, white setter who stood out against the blue-green sagebrush. He was about 30 feet away, and all 55 pounds of my snow-white setter was still. I wasn’t sure whether he’d found a straggler that hadn’t flushed with the covey, or maybe it was the wounded bird. I got closer and could see he was in a tight point, his nose inches off the ground.
He was pointing the lifeless bird.
“Huh?” I thought. Nothing I’d learned about bird dogs before adding Jack to my posse had prepared me for this.
Pointing dead, I learned, wasn’t all that uncommon with bird dogs.
That worked for a while, long enough that I learned to live with it. It was fine. He didn’t let wounded birds get away; he just didn’t pick up and fetch dead. It wasn’t classic dog work, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world either.
Later, while out with a friend hunting Mearns quail, I watched as my friend’s Brittanys did all the retrieving. They were usually faster to the birds anyway, so Jack rarely had a chance, but those smaller, faster retrievers took care of the birds before Jack got to them. And regardless of who shot the birds, those Brittanys always ran them back to my friend.
My setter, it turned out, was paying attention. The next day, when Jack and I had a chance to hunt, just the two of us, the first bird I killed, Jack ran over and retrieved it, without any prompting. It wasn’t just his first retrieve; it was a perfect retrieve.
This is when I began to learn that dogs understood a lot more about what we were doing than I’d given them credit for. Jack learned, watching my friend’s dogs, that pointing dead wasn’t best practice. Retrieving them back to your best hunting buddy was.
I’m still hoping this will pan out for my current setter, Jade, who ran over and picked up the first quail I shot in front of her, a California quail, but then made like she was about to run off and find a shady spot under a Joshua tree where she could snack at her leisure. I stopped her, however, and she reluctantly handed over the bird. That “retrieve” was one of the few of her career.
Sadly, none of my regular hunting buddies have bird dogs that consistently retrieve these days. I could use a good bird dog to show my new girl the ropes. I’ve nearly succumbed to adding a pointing Labrador to our unit so I have a retriever I can count on, but things haven’t gotten that desperate, yet.