1-7-25

 Seren:  Klehr Field. Short, snow-covered grass, starting to melt in sunny spots. When run, 31 degrees, 12 mph, 64%. Track laid @10:15 & aged 1 hr. 20 min.

Repeated the step to the side exercise, this time with 4 sidesteps (L,R,L,R) in 170 yds, food jackpot 15-20 yds into new portion. Only start & end articles. Crossed a few human tracks & hundreds of small bird prints, all there before I put in the track. 

Seren did really well with this today. I used the line at 20 feet, but she never got close to that far off the track. At each sidestep, her head came up at less than her body length beyond the end of that portion of the track. She always checked right first, then left. If next portion was to the left, she went with it, & came back to the right only if that was where the track was. By the 3rd sidestep, she was really getting into it, chugging along in a way atypical for her.  Didn’t mind lying down in the snow to indicate the 2 articles. At the end because of the snow, I was able to measure my 2 giant steps to the side, & that was 9ft.


Dylan: Chamberlayne Elementary. Short, snow-covered grass, which I don’t think had started to melt yet. Track laid @ 9:40 & run fresh. 29degrees, 70%, 9mph

Two turn track, See Google Earth photo. S5, W10, F, W10, S5, etc. At turns, S5 in & 5 out, food every 3 scuffs. Crossed human & dog tracks from yesterday & earlier today.

Dylan did a good job. Worked on a very short line.


He followed one of the human tracks from this AM a few feet, but gave it up on his own. Stopped & lifted his head once in response to something I couldn’t perceive in the nearby woods. Made turns nicely. Picked up most, but not all, of the food drops. I had to help him lie down at the end. 

Comments

  1. JudiJanuary 7, 2025 at 11:07 AM

    Excellent. I love that Seren has figured this out…and is giving you a clear L-R preference for checking. Good info to have!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jack's JourneyJanuary 7, 2025 at 1:19 PM

    glad to hear that the re-acquisition track energized her. i like the giant side step method as i have been using it for years. sounds like she got into a rhythm with it and that helps us to see patterns.
    today, jack and i tried judi's method of moving them off the track at an article and then letting them find the track. he struggled which was great information for me. so we will be trying judi's method again before we go back to giant steps.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anne (Mila)January 9, 2025 at 1:52 PM

    Sounds like nice progress with both!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

12-8-24 Article Games with Dylan

 I’m cocky enough to think that Seren’s articles are pretty good (at least at the moment). I can think of a couple of games we could have fun with, but they would involve finding appropriate spaces outside, figuring out how to set up the tripod out there, yada, yada, yada. So I took the easy way out to complete the assignment & cheated by using the dog who actually needs this exercise & used Dylan, even though he isn’t in the class. So that he can start generalizing his indication behavior,  I used 2 articles, each stuffed with food. One is the slipper that I use for his little starter tracks, the other a glove he found at the park last week. He isn’t real fluent with his verbal lie down cue yet, so I stayed pretty close to him. That worked out well as my food tossing skills are not to be bragged about either. In retrospect, I probably should have set the articles up ahead of time, as I’m not sure if the movement or the scent made him go to them. But he was definitely ...
Read more

3-20-25

Image
 Klehr Field. partly cloudy, 68 degrees, wind 12 mph & gusty, 43% humidity  Seren did a 4 turn track, each leg ~50 yd. Scuffed out of turns 1,2,&4. Food @35 on legs 2&3. Article @25 on leg 4 with food @35. Track laid @9:05 & aged 3 hrs Start & articles were fine. Overshot 1st turn by 12 steps but turned to the left & came back on her own & found 2nd leg. Same with 2nd turn, but by only 10 steps. Before the food on leg 3 got distracted by something off to the right & I had to tell her to get back to work. The food was fortuitously placed so she got rewarded for just a few steps back on the track. Cut the corner at turn 3 by ~5 ft. 4th turn was right on. I will aim for Seren’s next track to be 2.5-3 hrs old Dylan did a 4 turn track, laid @11:15& aged 20 min.  Scuffed start & out of turns. Food every 30yds. First leg paralleled chain link fence maybe 5 feet away & went between fence & goal post. There was some trash on the fiel...
Read more

2-5-25

Image
 Courthouse Park. Overcast, 40 degrees, 6mph, 60%. Track laid @8:40&aged 100min. This was a cover change with turns track. At least 1 food drop per leg, sometimes more. All turns except 5th one scuffed, & there was a fair bit of scuffing on the straightaways in the woods, too - not necessarily intentional. Numbers on map indicate my steps, which are considerably less than a yard, especially in the woods. I estimate total length 450-500 yards. We did pretty well with this one. Seren’s tracking wasn’t her best but I felt like I was reading her well so we didn’t go wrong. I recovered all my flags & clothespins🙂. Start was good. Parallelling the hedgerow was more challenging than it usually is for Seren, but she worked it out. Turn into the woods was good. Hard to say if she indicated metal article in the woods, as there was a pile of animal poop about 18” from it that she tried to roll in. So she did lie down, but… Very nice tracking in the woods. Indicated fabric article...
Read more