February 15 Brigid -- Goals: 1. start building track age; 2. get her used to a combination of very short and long track legs. Short track (260 yards), 2 turns, legs of 60, 150 and 50 yards. Age 1:10 old. Articles on every leg (two on long leg). Food drops every 20 yards, high-value food drops (pieces of roast lamb) thrown onto articles. No scuffing. Short to medium cover, with some sections of pine straw and pine debris. Clear, 46°, wind force 2. 59% humidity. Brigid is starting strongly, and was not phased by rather drastic change of cover 10 yards after start. First turn was near tempting line of trees with critter-laden debris, and she did let herself get drawn beyond turn, but eventually found the track on her own. I'm not sure I wouldn't have followed the false track if it were blind, We have to continue to work through that sort of tempting cover. She stuck nicely to the long second leg, and found and indicated both articles; third turn was nice and clean, but she had pr...
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February 2024
January 30 Brigid -- 4-turn track in unfamiliar field. Medium length hayfield all around. 400 yards, 50 minutes old. Three articles. Clear, 43°, calm. Humidity 67%. Good start, great track accuracy all around. Good turns, although still has to work on corners. Found and indicated all articles. What is really encouraging is that she is enthusiastic and eager all the way around--pulling hard to final article. Millie -- Short (230 yard), 4 turn track on new field. Foray into deep and thick woods. Aged 2:20. Medium length hayfield and woods. Sunny, 43°, wind force 1; humidity 69% Excellent start and confident first turn (open right), found and indicated first (and all subsequent articles). Worked on second turn (open left) along tree line and made it cleanly; followed third leg along tree line, up to 90° right into woods. Hesitated for a moment, then checked right and plunged through thicket into woods. Found article after about 40 yards of thick woods, then worked hard to find ...
October 20 Millie - Goal: Give her a relatively short (250 yard) track introducing a few TDX-like wrinkles (cover changes, road crossing, turn at edge of woods) into her training. 3 turns, 2 articles. aged 0:55. Clean, confident start. No problem with first turn. Road crossing at first had her perplexed. In the end she did find the track by crossing and then working the far side until she picked it up. This time she had little problem with transition from medium grass into relatively deep vegetation. When we got to the wood line she made the turn without excess interest in finding critters (to my surprise), and made it to the end. All in all not a bad little exercise. I'm starting to identify a few things that need work; in particular I'd like to see her handling the unexpected, like a short road crossing better. Now we start on a rotation (starts, long tracks, old tracks, obstacles, and stairsteps)
October 17 Brigid - New dog (Ch Goose Creek Brigid O'Shaughnessy At Brownstone). A very bright girl, but never been tracking before. For the past three days running I have emulated the work Judi gave the newbies a couple of weeks ago. Absolutely clueless on the first track of the first day, but by the third track that day she was snuffling and going with the track, as she has done on the subsequent days. Nice start. Millie - After a nine-day layoff after Rochester I wanted to just introduce Millie to some of the wrinkles of a TDX track, so I laid one with a short road crossing and lots of weird changes of cover. But when we got to the track half of it had just been mowed over. It's good to give a dog challenges, but asking a dog to deal with that is just setting her up to fail. Can't work tomorrow, so we'll wait until Thursday.
October 15 Ilsa - Hard-surface work. ≅300 yards, 4 turns. 2:15 old. First leg (50 yards) and first turn on grass; remainder of track on either asphalt or concrete. Sunny, 59 degrees. Moderate Breeze (which made things really challenging). Humidity 56% [Note: Throughout this journal I have been using terms like Calm/Light Air/Light Breeze/Gentle Breeze to describe the wind. These are all pulled from the Beaufort Scale, which describes wind conditions in what I consider meaningful units from 0 (calm) to 12 (hurricane). I can't tell the difference between a 10 mph wind and a 11 mph wind, but I can tell the difference between a Gentle Breeze (Force 3, 8-12 mph) and a Moderate Breeze (Force 4, 13-17 mph)] Blind track. A couple of weeks ago she ran her first blind track with VST-like challenges, and I realized then that her indications are not nearly as clear and easy to read as they are on vegetated surfaces. The purpose of today's track was to some extent to practice a blind tra...
October 12 Ilsa - The purpose of today's track was to give her experience on heavily contaminated campus lawns at close to full age. She has worked well on moderately to heavily contaminated lawns before, but usually at about 1 1/2 hours. Today's track was aged 2:55; between when I laid it and when we ran it there had been two changes of class, and it ran through areas that large numbers of students have to cross during the change-over. 400 yards, 3 turns, 4 articles. She started strongly, and ran the first leg cleanly. Found the first corner easily, and went straight into the second leg, which ran between two closely-spaced buildings. But she had taken the turn a bit wide, and by the time she got dead on the track she had missed an article not too far beyond the turn. Then the track continued straight beyond the buildings, across a very heavily trafficked area. Aside from stopping to stare at a couple of passing students, she stuck with it very nicely. Again went some...
Sunday, October 8 Dog Obedience Training Club of Rochester NY Tracking Trial. Millie drew the first TD track, which was a bit of luck. There were already steady winds in the mid-teens, with gusts well into the twenties, but that was only going to get much worse as the day went on. The first, third and fifth legs were cross-wind; the second and fourth were downwind. She took off on the first leg (125 yards) very smartly, and proceeded two-thirds of the way down it with determination. Then, just to the left of the track, we both spotted a groundhog hole, one of those broad ones. She stopped, sniffed and, defying a "leave it", dropped down and rolled over in it. Well, that's not a bit deal, except that it took at least three minutes, perhaps as much as five, for her to regain the track. What saved her was that she was clearly working, so we didn't get the whistle. Finally she got it back, and proceeded to track with determination for the rest of the track, finding an...