How many times have you heard someone say something like this when talking about hunting public land roosters, “As soon as you shut the truck door, they all flush out the end of the slough and sail to the private.”
The implication is that those hard-hunted ditch chickens are onto the game, and they aren’t sticking around to see whether you can swing a shotgun correctly or not. But another way to look at it would be to find a different location to park, and not slam the truck door shut.
The value of being quiet when it comes to pressured birds can’t be overstated, yet most hunters don’t really consider it. This is probably because most of us eventually have to yell at our dogs, and it’s common for upland hunters to use whistles to command their four-legged hunting partners.
There are also beeper collars, which, to yours truly, are enough to make any experience in the field feel like low-grade torture. Some pointers end up with the old school location method of a bell. No matter how you slice it, we are comfortable making a fair amount of noise in the pheasant sloughs and the grouse woods.
I’d rather not, which is why my dogs all know a hand signal for every command I give them.
Say It Different Ways
Every single command I teach my dogs comes with a visual component. For example, if I want my dogs to heel, I will give the command and tap my hip. If I want the dog on my right side, that’s the side I tap. The same rules apply for the left side, because I have two dogs, and while it doesn’t come into play much while hunting, it does in training. Sometimes I need them to both heel correctly, but there’s only one parking spot on each side of my body.
In the field, if my dogs see me tapping my side, they know it’s time to get back and heel (which also functions like a proxy recall command as well). When we train, they get the audio and the visual at all times. You can do this for all of the basics, like sit, stay, and come. And you should, because it’ll result in a quieter time in the field, but also teach the dogs to look you right in the eyes for their next command.
The idea is that there should be no difference between the audio command and the visual one. They are interchangeable, and once the dog understands that, any check-back is an opportunity to direct them without making a sound. This doesn’t alleviate the need to ever make noise in the field, but it certainly helps.
It’s also something that is worth starting with puppies as soon as you bring them home, and it isn’t just the fodder of the hardcore waterfowler crowd. Upland hunters, and really most bird dog owners, should consider adding a visual component to their commands. I learned this lesson in northern Wisconsin years ago while hunting grouse, and I doubt I’ll ever forget it.
Flushing Fails
Pressured birds are masters of reading a hunting situation and flushing out of range. Some of them get out at distances where a rifle wouldn’t do you much good, not that you’d hit them with one anyway. Others seem to understand the buffer between a shotgun’s effective range and where they are just safe enough. Both are frustrating, and some are preventable.
This became evident to me after finding more than one set of grouse tracks etched into the snow that told a whole story. They’d start out in typical meandering, grouse fashion. Then the gait would start to stretch out, and before long, you’d see the Rorschach pattern of their wings in the snow, indicating that they’d brought flight into the escape equation.
Some folks will claim that grouse, as well as woodcock, don’t really run, but I’ve seen enough of both do just that to realize some folks are simply wrong. What was spooking those northwoods grouse was that they could clearly hear us coming. The same thing happens with pressured roosters, and when they do, it’s pretty likely they’ll get out way early.
When they don’t, the game bag tends to get a little heavier. It’s really that simple. This might seem like overkill, but it’s not. I spend all fall hunting public land birds in multiple states, and I can tell you that being able to communicate with my dogs silently has helped immensely.
It doesn’t hurt that I hunt solo a lot, but that’s also a public land tactic. The less commotion you make in general, the more likely you are to surprise birds in a way that they’ll sit tight versus run and wildly flush.
Hand signals are a part of that equation, and if you have a hunting dog, you might want to consider them for every command.
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