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2022-2023 Season Highlights

Putting an Elk in the freezer in late October freed us up to start chasing Chukars and Huns early this year, in mid November. We haven’t been able to do this for quite a while and it was interesting to see how different their behavior and foraging habits were. In November we found Huns almost exclusively eating dry weed and grass seeds rather than the green Cheatgrass shoots they focus on later. Here’s a photo of the crop contents from a bird shot on Nov. 20th.

Contents of Hun Crop From Nov. 20th

And one from a month later on Dec. 23rd after we had some snow melt and the Cheatgrass sprouted.

Crop Contents From Hun Shot on Dec. 23rd

We also found a few coveys that sat really tight in November, something that is rare later in the season after the birds have been pressured.

In December we had some great hunts highlighted by an afternoon with birds really concentrated on available forage. On one hunt we split up and found nine coveys in an hour and a half, with Tillie pointing four of them and Autumn pointing five. Almost all of these were running birds that flushed at the edge of gun range, or too far to shoot. Unfortunately the performance of the shooters did not match that of the dogs’ but we managed one for Autumn to retrieve.

Lisa With Autumn

Here’s a shot from Christmas day.

Working Lily on Christmas Day

We headed home to sit out a week of bad weather and arrived back at camp just as the snow stopped and the sky cleared.

Sunset Welcoming Us Back at Camp

We spent a lot of time this season shooting video of a couple youngsters for some projects we’ve been working on but we did manage to get a few fun photos with our more experienced dogs.

Tillie Taking a Break to Refill the Tank
Autumn Doing What She Does Best

We are excited about getting video of the dogs so we’ll share a few clips here.

Tillie working a running covey of Huns:

Heather and Autumn teaming up on finding and pointing  a covey:

We also managed to get footage of the first point made by both “Talus ” and “Lily”.  They’re 10 month old littermates out of our Piper x Mason litter from last March.

Talus:

Lily made this really nice find and point at dusk on our last day:

Lisa and Lily Celebrating Lily’s First Point

With that another season comes to an end. We had a great year, got a lot done with the dogs, and we have many memories of nice performance by all the dogs. Until next fall…

5 Comments

  1. K.C. and Diane Murphy

    What beautiful pictures, videos, and dogs! They brought back wonderful memories of hunting with Maggie, and make us excited to begin again. Thanks so much for sharing.

  2. Clay Mizer

    Great photos Lisa, glad to see there are some birds left in your area. Thanks for sending.
    Autumn looks a lot like my October Freckles, imagine they are related. Enjoyed the pictures and update!

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October Setters