So what you may ask would cause me to go against what I say is good advice, even though I know better, well lets just say that Butch has moved me to do so in the past few months, culminating in a great past few days.
It started about 6 years ago, when Bill Teat called me and asked me if I was interested in working this derby aged setter, he had been with another trainer in the fall and had placed in his only grouse derby stake that fall, 2nd in The Reuel Pietz Derby Classic in MN. I agreed not knowing much about him, but was pleasantly surprised when I started working him. Butch really impressed me with is athletic way of going as well as what I felt was a near perfect build for a setter. Izaak and I took Butch to the prairie that summer where I really learned a lot about Butch, I found out that he was a really good wild bird dog, always coming up with birds, I also learned that he was the most natural backing dog I had ever been around. Well time went on Butch and I traveled around training, trialing and hunting around the country. It was in the hunting part that I learned that Butch absolutely loved to retrieve, and I let him do so whenever I killed a bird for him. Thus came the hole, liberated birds were many times his undoing. In many trials he would be great on the ground, strong forward and fancy, then just when I least expected it a poor fling quail would end our bid. Well in training for those situations another of Butch's greatest qualities rose to the top, Butch is definitely the toughest setter I have ever worked with, not meaning that he was tough to train, but he has a great ability to take training, really a joy.
Well as time went on Butch placed in some walking trials and a few horseback weekend stakes in many venues including MN, WI, MI, TX. Then came one of my favorite performances of his career at the Montana OSD CH in August of 2005, 90 plus degrees and he ran a very strong hour, unfortunately he came up birdless, but it showed me he what it takes to compete as a major circuit shooting dog. A couple weeks later he proved it by being named runner up in the National Open Prairie Chicken Shooting Dog CH. We spent the rest of that fall running in Grouse Championships in MN,WI and MI, we didn't win but his versatility really was nice. Butch to this day is not a dog that gets lost, whether from horseback or foot, whether training, trialing or hunting.
As time went on and with changes in my life and circumstances that changed my my focuses our trialing became limited but our hunting increased. In 2007 when I decided to quit training for the public, I told Butch's owner that I would love to keep him and Bill Teat graciously allowed me to keep him and since then I have trialed him very sparingly but hunted him extensively, more on that later.
One thing that has not changed for me since I have curtailed my trialing activities, is my love for training dogs on the prairie in the summer. There is something about working dogs on wild birds whether it be from foot or horseback that really gets me excited. This summer whenever I went to work dogs, Butch was on the truck, with the thought that I might run him in the Dakota-Sask Open Shooting Dog Champiopnship in Sept., if he was ready. As the summer went on Butch was looking really good, so I entered him in the CH., he drew an afternoon brace with CH Elhew Hannabelle and the conditions were really tough, not real hot but warm and very windy, probably 30 mph, extremely tough conditions to point sharptails or huns in. It was a very memorable hour for me, Butch and Hannabelle really put on a show, Shawn and I had a blast watching these dogs run the prairie as well as could be done, sans one nonproductive point at about the 50 minute mark a great race was all we could muster, but it was fun anyways. I don't know if Butch will ever be turned loose in a trial again, but I think he still has another big win in him.
Now a little about Butch the hunting dog, many guys that have hunted over him have a hard time believing that he is "one of those big running field trial dogs" Butch has excelled hunting quail, pheasants, grouse, woodcock, sharptailed grouse and huns. In October of this year I took Butch on a hunting excursion in western ND, it was a charity event and our hunters were mostly Iran and Afghan war veterans, and I have heard from many of those guys that Butch showed them the hunt of there lives. I put that poor dog through things that no self respecting pointing dog should have to endure, hunting pheasants in large groups in heavy cover with cocker spaniels, I still feel kind of guilty about it but we needed him and I knew he could do it, he did not let me down, pointing and retrieving more birds than I could have ever counted in those two days and doing it at a pace and range that was perfect for the setting. Now what was the final trigger causing me to sit down and write this tonight? I spent the better part of the past 4 days hunting, pheasants, huns and sharptails. I hunted Butch some part of each day, running him in various covers and with different bracemeates, everything from brushy pastures to crp fields to cattail sloughs, with everyone from puppies to unbroke hunting dogs to our other old champion Berg Brother's Hytest. Once again Butch did not disappoint he made it so pleasurable that I could not help but reflect on the good times I have had with him over the years. Without getting to detailed he pointed several covey's of huns and sharptails along with dozens of pheasants this weekend, what a good dog he has been.
Here are two picture's I took of Butch on our last rooster today, the 1st picture is before the flush and the second is after the flush, shot and kill but before the retrieve.
Oh yeah and this one where we had just finished running a great looking CRP field/slough that really looked as though there should have been more birds in it than we found, we got back to the truck and he went over to this standing corn field as if to say, their in there boss.
That's all the news from the farm.
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