By Chad Love

With gas creeping toward (and in many cases breaking) five bucks a gallon, it's getting ever more expensive to drive to your training grounds. But if you live in a heavily-populated area with no adequate training grounds nearby, you really have no choice. And it's not a problem that's limited to suburban areas, either. Despite living in the sticks, I have limited access to good training grounds nearby and must drive for virtually all of my field training.

It's a never-ending struggle to find a good training spot, and then figure out a way to afford to get there. The trick is to get creative, and -- to use a horribly tired expression -- think outside the box. I've previously discussed some of my experiences in never-ending search for training grounds, some of the more, uh, unorthodox choices in the search for said grounds, and the idea of downsizing your rig to something more fuel efficient.

By Chad Love

Last year at about this time I wrote a Field Notes blog post on the coolest man in the world. I had no plans to make it an annual award, but that was before I finally got the chance to meet legendary dog trainer Delmar Smith at the Pheasants Forever Pheasant Fest and Quail Classic this past weekend.

I sat in on a lot of cool seminars, met a lot of cool people, saw a lot of cool dogs, and discovered a few cool new products (all of which I'll write about in future blogs), but for sheer, unadulterated cool, nothing could top listening to and meeting the undisputed dean of American bird dog trainers.

How cool is Delmar Smith? Chuck Norris showed up at one of his seminars, and Delmar had him force-broke and steady to shot by the end of the day. He's so cool the folks at NPR ask him to be on their game shows (No really, they did. Listen to the podcast. It's a gem. Delmar absolutely kills it...)

By Chad Love

I had an hour or two to kill this past Friday, so I decided that a short afternoon quail hunt at a spot just a few minutes from my house would fill those hours quite nicely. I loaded up my little setter, Jenny, and we were hoofing it through the sagebrush within 20 minutes of pulling out of the garage. 
 

A little while—one small covey of birds and no shots—later, we found ourselves back at the hunting wagon, Rocinante, sucking wind and water. I was, anyway. Jenny was remarkably energetic for having endured such a death march. I figured Jenny had run flat out for approximately 34 miles, and that I had walked at least 20 miles following her. I was also sure that Jenny had, on that wide-open prairie, opened her range up to that of an all-age horseback trial dog. Why, she wasn't even a dog on some casts, but a small, flowing white dot on the far horizon.
 

And then I looked at the data. Delusion, meet reality. As you can see from the photograph, Jenny ran a total of 7.7 miles, at a relatively steady and sedate average speed of 6.27 mph. Even on her longest cast, she was never more than a couple hundred yards away. (Disregard that 9.8 miles distance measurement. That's the distance from my house, where the pic was taken, to where I turned off Jenny's collar at the hunting spot.) And just how far did Iron Man here walk? Probably less than half of that distance, and certainly under four miles.
 

By Chad Love

There was an interesting article last month in a Texas A&M University publication called Agrilife Today, which sought to put a monetary value on the bobwhite quail.