Train Your Bird Dog to Mark Multiple Birds

Video Transcript

"Hi! I am Charlie McCanna, and on behalf of Expert Village.com, we are going to be talking today a little bit about retriever training. Heidi … heel. I brought along my buddy Heidi to help us demonstrate. We have already talked about single marks; and when you get out hunting, many times you are going to drop more than one bird at a time. So you want your dog to be able to mark more than one bird at a time. You can get up to as many as three, four, five, you don’t know. A dog’s memory is only so long, but you want to work on getting multiple marks into their head, so they learn to see one bird fall, then look for the next one, see where it fell and look to the next one. I will demonstrate with Heidi. Heidi… mark… mark… mark… Heidi. You want your dog to go fetch the last bird down first, that way they only have the other two as memory birds. Heidi… If you erred and went after the first bird down, that is going to make them remember all three birds, and it just makes it more difficult for the dog. Heidi… Heidi. Now, Heidi was a little bit off, but because of her good nose, she smelled it as she got closer and then she spotted it. Do this a lot; marks are the most important thing that you can do with the retriever, lots and lots of marks. Your dog has to have that down pat for when you are out in the field hunting. You want your dog always looking to see where things come down and mark them and remember them. If you do that, I think you will have success in the field."