Tracking season

Some of things I love about fall: leaves changing, a hot drink on a cool morning, walks in the woods, Halloween, fresh roasted pumpkin seeds still hot from the oven, cooking , and tracking season. Tracking with dogs is one of my favorite activities. It's absolutely amazing the abilities that dogs have to scent and tracking gives people a way to be a part of that. Yesterday Noel and I tracked for the first time in a year, since Eva was born. Well, actually that's not entirely true - we followed a 12 hour blood trail from a deer a few days before, in training for tracking wounded deer for hunters. But yesterday was our first day back at competition tracking. We are preparing for the Tracking Dog Excellent test, which is a 1/2 mile track with 7-9 turns, 4 articles of clothing to find, and between 3 and 5 hours old. The most difficult part of tracking is finding the time necessary to train for it. I laid a track through some thick rough cover, with 4 turns, 4 articles, and aged a little over an hour. She is trained to lie down when she finds an article and only did that once yesterday, the other articles I had to give her a verbal command - she paused at the articles but then wanted to keep tracking. Something for us to work on. Because of the difficult cover we got tangled up on small trees constantly, but it was good practice b/c this can easily happen during a test. She did great finding the start direction and didn't have any trouble tracking in the thick cover. There was one solid dirt area that she had a little trouble on, so that's another skill that we will need to work harder at. It was also at 5 pm in the afternoon so everything was very dry and more difficult to scent. Overall she ran a nice track and it was a good first practice back. I'm looking forward to our next opportunity to get out again. Note to self: never wear sweaters when tracking through tall thick cover - it's going to take me hours to pick all the stickers off my sweater.