First live bird contact

The other day I rigged up a half-assed bastard version of Scampwalker's pigeon pole from whatever scrap materials I could scrounge from around the house and planted it (with quail attached) in the vacant lot across from our house.

Obviously my pole is much shorter than his (don't worry, I'm used to it) and I cut the string length to about twelve feet, but it seemed to work reasonably well.

After setting two of them out I snapped Jenny into a check cord and brought her in downwind of them.

A nice solid point, and I'm pretty sure she was at least attempting to use her nose, as the quail had buried itself into the weeds about eight feet or so on the other side of the pole. But now I know why Scampwalker uses a ten-foot pole and a forty-foot lead attached to the bird, because when I walked in to flush the bird, it flew up 12 feet and then promptly bounced right back down on top of us. A few moments of sheer pandemonium ensued.

So lesson learned: give the bird enough altitude to at least give the illusion of escape.

So we then worked into the second pole. Another solid point. Another flush. More pandemonium. Much fun. Quail season starts in nine days. She has no idea what she's supposed to be doing. I have no idea how to effectively teach her what she's supposed to be doing, but I think we're going to have a lot of fun being clueless together.