By Chad Love

With Christmas just a few days away, here are some last-minute gift ideas for the wingshooting, dog-owning person on your list. Or yourself.

Some of them I may have previously mentioned and am mentioning again because, well, I like them; others I just haven't gotten around to writing about yet. But all of them are things I have personally used and can recommend.

First up is L.L. Bean's technical upland pants. I tried them on a hunt in Montana and fell in love with them—hand-down my new favorite bird-hunting pants. They're light, fit well, tough where they're supposed to be tough, and stretchy where they're supposed to be stretchy. In the words of sexy Ned Flanders, "It's like I'm wearing nothing at all!" However, as comfortable as they were in the relatively thorn-free fields of Montana, I had my doubts they'd hold up to the vicious sandplum thickets back in Oklahoma. I was wrong. Halfway through our quail season and they still look great and perform flawlessly. At $109, they're not cheap, but good things rarely are.

By Chad Love

I've previously blogged about the dangers of losing your dog. By now many of you and your dogs have been hunting for well over a month, and hopefully none of you have experienced it this season. A lost dog in the field (or anywhere) is one of the most panic-inducing things a hunter can experience. That’s why most of us have our dogs chipped, have flat tags riveted to their collars and why many of us run GPS collars like the Astro when we hunt.

But here’s an interesting question: What do you have stamped on your dog’s collar tag? I have to admit, I’ve always just included my name, city, state and home phone number and called it good, but as I was ordering new collars for my dogs recently I read an interesting article on Steve Snell’s gundogsupply website that detailed what Steve considered the most important information for a collar tag, which includes multiple phone numbers, your name and not the dog’s, followed by your city and state.

By Chad Love

OK, all you boat-owning waterfowl doggers: I need some training advice...

I have always been a walk-in duck hunter. In fact, I've never even owned a boat. But two things happened to me recently to help bring some change to my waterfowl hunting techniques.

One, I turned 40, which means I am now officially decrepit and therefore can no longer pack in gear on a walk-in hunt without imminent threat of heart attack. Two, last season I very nearly drowned in, oh, about two feet of water and ice while busting through thick reeds with way too much decoy weight on my back. I had a "You're kidding me? I'm gonna die like this?" moment. I didn't. At least I'm pretty sure I'm still alive. Then I had the obligatory "I'm too old for this, uh, stuff" moment.

By Chad Love

There has never been a greater quantity of easily accessible resources for the beginning retriever trainer than there are today. From dozens of DVD-based training programs to Internet websites, chatrooms, bulletin boards, forums and blogs that are frequented by thousands of like-minded gundog enthusiasts, you’re just a mouse click away from answers to any training question or problem you are likely to encounter. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is feverishly working on a retriever training iPhone app (and if they aren’t, I’ve got dibs).

Compare that to just a few years ago. I’m not exactly old, but when I got my first dog the only information sources I had were a stack of old Field & Streams and a copy of Bill Tarrant’s "Hey Pup, Fetch It Up!" A few years later I did acquire some worn-out VHS copies of Rex Carr and Mike Lardy training seminars, but that was about as high-tech as it got back in the early 1990s.

Right now is truly the Golden Age of gundog training information. So why am I singing the praises of a musty, old-fashioned Gutenberg 1.0-based training app that was first published back in the Stone Age, A.D. 1979?

Because D.L. Walters’ Training Retrievers to Handle is - in a field crowded with a number of very good training books and systems - still one of the classic treatises on teaching your dog to run blinds and handle, whether for the field or field trials.