To some, this is intuitive, to others it may be novel. Work the wind with your dog to improve your success in the field. The two reasons we use dogs to hunt are, their sense of smell, and their social nature (they hunt in a pack). The sense of smell in a dog is the first sense they develop. Before they hear, see, or are even aware of others in the litter, they can smell. In fact, dogs smell somewhere on the order of one-thousand times better than humans (220,000,000 olfactory receptors), and something like 14% of their brain is devoted to their sense of smell. (I don’t know how this compares to humans, but there’s got to be a huge difference.)

I was excited to see my 18 month old puppy running way out and working the wind back to me while hunting chukars on the downwind side of the mountain. My older, more experienced dog did this as a matter of routine. The first time someone told me that their dog would range out and purposely hunt into the wind back into them I was amazed and thought it was just a fluke.  Now it doesn’t surprise me, I expect it.

One of my favorite experiences that I had happen several times was when hunting in brome grass CRP fields, I had a dog tracking pheasants running with the wind. The dog, a VDD wirehair pointer, would stop, lift her head up, and run way out and around and work back on the pheasant, trapping in between us. Truly awesome, if you ask me. That is why I love hunting with dogs.

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