Practice birds

[RyeGuy74]

I know a lot of people use pigeons to train their dogs on due to the fact that they're cheaper and easier for puppy to start with but my question is, if I only hunt pheasants should I, after the puppy gets a little bigger/older, just entirely switch to getting pheasants from the bird farm to practice on?

 

[Brittany Chukarman]

I'm not a great trainer and I've never trained with live birds but my experience has been that once a dog gets "birdy" they will hunt any game bird. I started my pups with a chukar wing on a fishing pole that I jerked away from them until they pointed it. Before that I used a sock filled with feathers to play with them and get them started retrieving.

 

[WV Hunter]

Pigeons are great for introducing birds to a pup and advanced stuff like getting a started dog steady to wing, shot and fall. Frozen and freshly killed pigeons are great for retrieving as well. Once you’ve done that there isn’t much use for training birds. Just get them out there hunting. If you’re doing preserve hunts you’ll have opportunities to correct any mistakes in the field. If it’s wild birds they’ll teach the dog.

I’m not sure what breed you have but if it’s a flushing dog you’ll spend more time working on your dogs range and quartering, etc after intro to birds. I can’t tell from your avatar but it looks like a lab. If that’s the case you can download a free book from the guy who started Wildrose Kennels from this site:

HOME | Duckhill Kennels

www.duckhillkennels.com

 

[Hunting Wife]

We started giving ours wings we’d saved from the previous year as soon as she came home. That was her first introduction to actual game bird scents. We gave her pigeons a couple times early on just to get live birds in her mouth, and then used them for gunfire intro. After that, she just learned by chasing wild birds, and if we wanted to work on things in the yard we’d just zip-tie a wing to a bumper.

We are no experts, but I think just getting the dog into wild birds taught her way better than anything we could have done.

 

[Don Fischer]

I don't beleve you can do better than pigeons for the complete training process. Once training is done introducing to wild birds is a breeze, just take them hunting and they catch on real quick. Problem with pen raised game birds is most don't act like wild bird's pretty much regardless of what you do, pigeons act exactly like game birds depending on how you use them.You go buy a few chukars at, around here, $10 ea and get a single use out of them. Got catch some wild pigeon's, put them in a loft and have some young ones and you have a never ending supply of birds that come home for free!

 

[Nutrioso]

I am no expert, but my experience is if you hunt wild pheasants you risk teaching your dog bad habits if you give them a steady diet of game farm birds. Pigeons work fine for the basics as noted above, but a pen raised pheasant won’t be very helpful in teaching about wild birds.

 

[2rocky]

My dad has had good luck using farmed Chukars. Reason being not as much scent and hold well for a young dog.