Today I decided to lay a track on Ians field that had been cut about three weeks ago. As Heidi had been having a bit of trouble on tight turns I thought it would be a good idea to just stick to a square shape formation of track without too many turns, although most of her trouble seems to stem from the dry conditions we have been having, and the short vegetation in the areas of the tracks.
If I was to keep the turns to a minimum then I would have to add another challenge. This was by increasing the age of the track to seven hours, and the the distance to half a kilometre.
Things started well. I put Heidi's tracking kit on about 20m from the starting point, and as I led her to the area, she picked up the line with no problem, and I almost felt useless as I told her to 'track on'. We have used this field before, and it always seems to have been frequented by game of some sort, but never other dogs. As Heidi led the way all the leash was out, with good tension and her nose down. Then suddenly she stopped to sniff a specific spot for about ten seconds, which to my mind had no relevance to the line, then just as quickly carried on as before.
All went well until we approached the first left handed corner, when suddenly two rabbits bolted from the hedge on the left hand side, ran across in front of her, then dissapeared out of the field right in front of Heidi's path. This was a major distraction for Heidi, even though she has never been encouraged with rabbits, and never will be. Not that she ran after them, but was very curious and wanted to investigate the area where they had been. I stopped her on the leash and gave her a verbal sign of dissaproval. She thought about what she had just witnessed for a few seconds, and returned to the area of the line, whereupon after a bit of ringing, she got her nose down, dealt with the turn and continued on her way towards the next right turn. The way things were going I thought we were on for a record run!
Once we approached the turn, she got to 4 meters or so, and cut straight across the corner (above pic).
This would have been in accordance with the direction and strength of wind, so I thought this was pretty good going, and she took off up the field towards the next turn, with a good tight leash. Once at the turn, she went left instead of right, realised she was on to nothing, came back, picked up the scent, and started off at great gusto, only to stop after about 20m, turn round and come back towards me, having apparently no idea of where to go! After what seemed like an eternity of me just standing still and quiet, and her going backwards, forward, round and round, she got her nose down again and off we went.
This was on the home straight, no more turns as such, just a fairly straight line back towards the field gateway, and again it looked great with another tight leash.
However, we got to within several meters of her find, where I had gone off to the left at a slight angle to place her finish and Heidi slowed right down, and went off to the right! After her sniffing and looking around, she came back to me looking bewildered.
After scanning my eyes across the ground in front of us, I spotted the problem. Yep, those wretched thistles, Hiedi's worst enemy, had just started coming through, and I had not noticed them when I laid the track. As you can see from the pic above, she just sat down and refused to move forward, even with a gentle tug on the leash, she just dug her heels in. I ended up going up to her giving praise and encouragement whilst guiding through the small minefield of about 3m of the things.
Once through she almost dived on her find, as if to say 'I knew it was there, but its not worth the pain of the thistles'.
We then proceeded to have a great play with the skin, again trying to get her to speak at it by holding it above her and teasing her with it.
Age of track: 7hrs
Length of Track: Approx 500m.
Type of track: Shoe and diluted blood.
Amount of blood: 250ml (1/2 diluted with cleave juice).
Wind direction: From the right and ahead
Wind strength: 8-12 mph
Temp: 18ºC
Weather: Cloudy, rain previous night
Time: 06.00pm
Age of Dog: 4 1/2 months
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