hunting dog journals

[OH Osthaus]

Every now and then we have discussed hunting journals, some of us keep them, seems most don’t. And content/details varies.

I am a paradox, I have, through the years, diligently kept a journal and made entries for my setters. And I sometimes write a fair amount about the day's events.

This has not been true for the retrievers for some reason, the few notes I had on my first retriever were lost at some point and the one for Macallan gets only occasional entries – maybe it’s the difference between sights seen while traveling distances in the woods with a setter verses sitting in a boat with a retriever waiting for birds to come to me. On the other hand, I end up with, by far, many more photos of duck hunts than upland.

I bring this up because in the past few days I was rereading some George Bird Evans books which are largely based on his journal pages. That along with thinking about some of the training, weight gains and occasional backsliding on house breaking with Tweed encouraged me to get some of my old journals out to see how the earlier dogs compared.

I have to say, this trip down memory lane has been a lot of fun- and educational - for example – I have been concerned about the number of very warm days we have had the past few years, but going back over 25 years of written memory I find this is not new. 60 and 70 degree days lasting into November are not rare.

I started out using those "marbled" covered composition books we used in school back in my day. I filled three of them for the first setter. at one point I found a close out on leather covered blank books, I bought the lot of them and switched to filing them.

I could, from memory, walk you to the spot where Old Hemlock Osthaus’ first point and kill on a woodcock occurred, as well as the location and odd circumstance of his first grouse productive point and kill. I had somehow forgotten those two tremendous events for a 10 month old setter happened on the same day

I am no George Bird Evans - but maybe if there is interest there is a story or two here -

I had to laugh at this entry for one, we tend to remember the dogs as bird finding saints - but they all have their days