Working Ducks

Mesa & I have started working the ducks again.

As I probably pointed out sometime before, my yard is not appropriate for dog-breaking ducks or duck-breaking a dog. The open part -not garden, patio, or side yard is roughly 42′ x 20′- too small for an inexperienced dog to stay far enough off them and just full of places for ducks to run and hide in the garden parts, patio furniture, & side yard. No room for mistakes, and this is me. I did one time try to make a duck round pen out of chopped down snow fence. Mesa wouldn’t stay inside it. She kept jumping out to work wider. Pretty cool problem for me, but a failure of the technology. My solution was to take them out to my dog training club. The club is on 5 acres of nice “flat” open grass with a couple of fenced training fields coveted for agility. The fenced areas are perfect for the above endeavors. The extra acres are great for real working space once everybody is under control. (Practicing B course?) I have to be very careful not to disturb the fenced areas in any way. Last fall I kinda got in trouble about using it. You know, ’cause working ducks could rip up the turf (really?) and the scent of old duck droppings are too much for dogs doing other sports (really?). Should I tell folks about the ass-end of a rabbit I found on the field this spring? Bits of hawk devoured bird or rodent I find regularly? And for godsakes people – who would put sheep or… cows out there?? (yes, this was really brought up). I completely understand the concern for keeping the fenced field in good condition, my field too yah know? And I never put ducks out there right before (actually a couple weeks before) a trial in deference to poop concerns. I even try to pick up wood shavings that get kicked out of the duck crate. Anyway, it was decided that, yes, I am allowed to use the fenced areas for this training. So now I have a load-em-up-and-transport system worked out.

Mesa is actually pretty freaking good with her ducks when she slows down and con-cen-trates. My primary goal is to get her to always be aware that she needs to be calm and thinking…most of the work comes naturally after that -translated from sheep. She lives for this stuff and doesn’t get to do it often enough. She can still get very excited. Once she puts her thinking cap on, it’s just a lot of practice reading ducks and putting them here and there. My ducks are very sensitive to a dog’s presence, but are getting blasé about the human involved. Can ducks actually get fetchy?? [I since figured out that I was the draw…because I'm the only familiar thing out there. At home, they do not fetch.] Once we were all on the same page, we worked on driving. Argh, field is too small for this. Mesa could barely go about 10ft without having to switch direction on the long side. Ok, out to the open field…..that helped quite a bit. After we’d walked about 50ft the ducks realized there was no fence. Whaah-hoo! They ran for it. Not so fetchy now! But Mesa’s now (almost!) reliable square flanks kept them in place. Oops, she didn’t cover far enough that time and they went barreling for the building…not a problem, she broke out far and wide to head them off. Yes! Now I can work outside the fences!

This is something I wrote in March, but just never posted. Since then, I’ve had some problems with the dog running loose on the neighboring property. One of my ducks was injured in the first meeting, but has since recovered. Yes, ducks can run so far, so fast that they sprain something. I also need to come up with a strong draw out there for training. I’ve never had much trouble keeping them away from the crate.