Im wanting to advance my pup on harder marks but was wondering if you all can give any tips on good bird placement. what does one look for to make a mark more diffucult. when you walk into a field what pops out and tells you to throw a mark there. and is there any articles that teaches good bird placement.
Get some old issues of Retriever Field Trial News, which has the Pat and Andy articles on the issue as well as many others recently. In particular, there was a letter to the editor in the July 2011 issue from Dr. Gwaltney. In it, he tried to come up with a method do quantify the difficulty of field trials by coming up with numbers for various factors. It was very interesting and helpful when thinking about factors and bird placement.
Dr. Gwaltney's book, Training and Campaigning Retrievers has a chapter dedicated to this theory of calculating the difficulty of a marking setup. That chapter, and the rest of the book are very interesting and a good book to have in your library.
Put something in their way en route to the bird. Strips of cover, cover changes, roads, ditches, water and hillsides.
Make it easy at first, keep their route perpendicular to the obstacles. As they progress angle the dog through the obstacles. Angle into and out of water, angle across points with multiple entries.. They tend to want to square the cover or miss the cover, square points and water, causing them to miss the bird. Keep the wind direction in mind. Set it up so if they miss the mark the wind doesn't give it to them.
Run long sidehill marks they will want to go up or down rather than staying on the sidehill.
If you put 2 or more obstacles or angles together it gets even more difficult.
Take this for what it’s worth for I am new to the retriever world and learning myself but a successful armature explained it this way to me once and it made sense. When you look at the training grounds look for factors such as Hills, cover, water, Wind, ditches, roads, points, backgrounds, and obstacles. Then think about what each factor does to the dog. If the dog gives into the factor where will it take them?
For example, a ditch when a dog encounters a ditch in route to a mark he is faced with three options Depending on the angle. He can give in and run down it for a couple steps, he can hold a straight line and angle into it or he will square the ditch.
You then think about where will the dog end up if he gives into the factor which will make him Screw up, place your guns and bird accordingly. So that if he does give into the factor it will lead him to an old fall or another mark or behind the gun whatever skill you are working on that day but just make sure it does not give up the bird.
So back to the ditch if you want to give your dog a good test you will set your bird up where the line is at such angle across the ditch. To increase difficultly run as memory with multiple guns and marks. Set your gun and bird placement up as follows. If your dog gives into the ditch and follows it, he will have to fight the wind to correct and if he continues to fade it will lead him to an old fall. If your dog squares the ditch it may lead him to hunt on the back side of the gun. This is a fairly simple example and may not make sense at all to the reader, but the moral of story is look at your factors think of what each factor does to your dog and what decisions your dog will have to make and set the birds and guns up accordingly.
There was a good discussion on this topic last year. Ted had some really good input on the effect of angles and using not just cover/terrain changes but the angles they create.
Get out and train with people who know how to train dogs, remember what works from day to day..week to week and month to month, that's the best way to learn bird placement...experience it. If possible find a group where your allowed to set up marks and learn/remember what the dogs did, after awhile set 2 marks up for your group and explain why you put it there. Books and seminars are fine BUT you need to experience the whys and how comes in person...Randy
As the story goes "good bird placement " will allow for the use of "difficult marks" rather than difficult marking "concepts"
I've been told that they are hard to discribe, but that the person doing the talking "knows one when they see one".
To this I say show me a few concept free marks/ marking setups
john
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