Yesteray Griz and I went on our first chukar hunt ever with a friend of mine and his dog.... I thought I was in pretty good shape but this hunt proved that theory wrong in a big hurry! I've hunted elk in some steep country before but that was at a fairly leisurely pace. Keeping up with two labs in that kind of country is a whole different story.

I have to admit that I was a litle disappointed with Grizat first because all he wanted to do was chase the other dog's tail (she was in heat) and although he is young (only 8 months now) you could tell that he was interested even if she was ignoring him. Things did get better though after we found a few birds. By the middle of the day we actually had a pretty good system worked out.... The other dog would hunt birds and Griz would tail her. We would watch and if the scent was strong enough for Griz to stop hunting a piece of tail and start hunting birds we knew we were about to get into them.

Even when we knew we were right on top of them, it seemed like I was never quite ready. I was either looking at my feet so that I didn't fall, or I was in the middle of a fall when a covey of those little buggers would come rocketing off the side of the hill! There were also several times that I would shoot at birds until my gun was empty and THEN the rest of the covey would take off!

We hunted like crazy and saw close to a hundred birds, if not slightly more than that, and after a few pointers from my buddy, I actually managed to connect on a couple. The highlight of my day though was Griz's frst ever retrieve of a live bird!

I knocked one down and it landed about 70 or 80 yards out. Griz ran over, picked it up, brought it back, and dropped it right into my hand like he had been doing it his whole life! After that I feel like I can officially call him a hunting dog and not just an overgrown lap dog!

Here's a picture of the end results for those who are interested.