While up at the Jameson farm on Monday we also set up some birds in launchers for Wilma, and she locked up on some solid points. I usually end up on the other side of Wilma, working her on the check cord, so it was nice to capture her darling concentration while pointing. Big, deep, sniffs of bird scent and intensly focused eyes.
Brandon’s first two deer - first one on the right, second on the left, both shot with an arrow fired from a Hoyt compound bow. We cleaned and mounted the skulls ourselves,
Out running Wilma on some grouse, no shooting, as they are not in season til the fall, but trying to get her on as many as possible before they start having chicks.
She came into her first heat on Sunday the 15th, and these pictures were taken Easter Weekend, before her Birthday. We’ve dubbed it grouse lane, as in just over 2kms she found over a dozen birds, yet again.
As can be noticed in the last two pictures, she has learned from the grouse and sometimes flies around.
Today is the little goober girl’s first birthday. We celebrated with a long hike through the woods in pursuit of grouse and hare. No birds were shot, as the season is closed until fall, but she was livin’ it up and pointed a baker’s dozen of birds, and got after several hares (who look clownish at the moment, stuck in a marbled limbo between winter white and summer brown).
She’s grown from a little 13 pound (when she arrived to us) ankle biter in to
We’ve been making a concerted effort to take Wilma out running several times per week. The snow is deep and impassible without snowshoes, which gets her some great excercise when we are out after hares (she sinks up to her chest and has to bound through it with the force of a freight train). However, since early January we’ve had our Skidoos up here with us, and have also made great use of the back trails into secluded lakes. She powers along the skidoo trails, which are generally packed down from use, running in excess of 5 kilometres each way (10k round trip). She seems to love it almost as much as finding birds. On straightaways and across frozen lakes she speeds on at around 50km/h, not her top speed, but pretty damn fast for the terrain covered. She has figured out the game fairly quickly and can hardly wait to take off. She keeps pace ahead of us, adjusting her speed to ours.
Apart from roading her off an atv when she has structurally matured in another year or so, this exercise for her is hard to beat. I look forward to when the lakes and snow thaw and we can swim and hunt/hike hard through the lakes and forest, but I’ll definitely be missing winter come spring time.
Even after we’ve stopped and are unpacking the sled to set up our fishing gear, she’ll zoom around the tracks we’ve made in the snow.
