By Chad Love

If you're a quail or pheasant hunter, September is sort of a holding pattern month. The cool(er) weather gets your anticipation factor jacked up and you'll probably go on a few dove hunts, but what you really crave - the bird season opener - is, in most states, still a couple months away. So you pace, work the dogs, pace some more, look at the calendar and wait. For gundog and upland fanatics, it can be an agonizing wait. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, if you're willing, you can be in the field behind your dog as early as September 1.

How? By temporarily forgetting about quail and pheasants and instead focusing your attention on those "other" birds, our native prairie grouse; sage grouse, sharptails and prairie chickens. Overlooked and underloved by most hunters, overshadowed by the two 800-pound gorillas of the upland world, these magnificent native gamebirds offer a fantastic opportunity to get you and your dogs in the field and hunting weeks or months before most quail or pheasant openers. And often as not, you'll have those fields mostly to yourself, if you're willing to drive and more importantly, walk.

By Chad Love

Today's blog is both a mini-review of a product and a handy-dandy training tip, all rolled into one smelly, disgusting post. For the past few months I've been using one of the new Tri-Tronics Upland Special G3EXP e-collars and thus far it's been a rock-solid performer. The transmitter's layout is easy to understand, its' shape is grippy and ergonomic. The collar is light and unobtrusive and, like virtually all Tri-Tronics products I've used in the past, it's been dead-reliable. Among those who know and hunt with me I am infamous for losing and/or breaking any type of electronic gear. So if I noodle around with something for an extended period of time and it doesn't break, it probably won't.

I love the collar, but I have discovered the Upland G3's one glaring flaw: it's not unloseable (see paragraph above). This weekend I was working my young setter on some planted birds when the transmitter apparently fell out of my shorts as I bent down to pick up something. I had already finished training and loaded up the dog so I wasn't using it and therefore never noticed it gone.

By Chad Love

Last Thursday was the dove opener in my home state, which meant I spent most of the day sitting at the base of prairie windmill baking my noodle in the 106-degree heat and reminding myself with each passing bird how little I practiced on the clays this summer. It took me a little while to limber up, but once the doves really started flying I got into that old familiar cadence my friends know so well: Bam. Bam. Curse. Bam. Bam. Curse. Look at shotgun in disbelief. Bam. Bam. Curse. And so on, ad infinitum, or at least until I run out of shells.

But on toward evening, with my shotgun's barrels glowing cherry red, a K2-sized pile of smoking hulls at my feet, and a pitifully light game bag on my back, I spied a pair of huge doves winging their way toward my stock tank. Inexplicably, I managed to hit both of them and they fell to the earth with the kind of audible thud you just don’t get from a mourning dove. I had just shot my first-ever non-native invasive upland bird (pheasants, huns and chukars notwithstanding), the Eurasian collared dove. When I went to pick them up (remember, the dog stayed home) I was impressed with how much larger they are (damn near pigeon-sized) than a native mourning or whitewing dove.