Thank you! That is exactly what I am looking for. Hopefully others will share their experience and what worked for them and we can have some good discussion generated here.
To give some more context to my questions I can summarize my story and my situation. And I will point out also some similarities in training, although I have to admit that it sounds like you have more experience, more time and more ground availability than me.
I have already introduced myself in the intro section of the forum, but just in case here we go again.
My name is Giuseppe (although if you have a hard time pronouncing it "Joe" does work well too). I live in Iowa and hunt upland birds almost exclusively. As my name give it away I am originally from Europe, Italy to be more specific. I am 35 and I have worked a lived in the US for the last 11 years. My wife is from the US and we have 3 kids. I grew up hunting upland birds with my father in Italy using exclusively pointing dogs. I had several breeds growing up including a Bracco Italiano (actually my first dog), English setters, Pointers, GSPs and Epagneul Bretons. All of these were Italian blood lines, mostly hunting lines with some having some field trial blood in them. Both my dad and I were interested mostly in hunting so any training for these dogs was formalized only to that scope, hence my knowledge of gun dog training was limited (and it still is. It is better now, but I am still a newbie).
Italy has its own little world as far as bird dogs go, with its own style, aesthetics and training methods. Italians in the last few decades have been particularly obsessed with blood lines that are proven to be excellent on woodcock. I used to like how us Italians bred and trained bird dogs, but I found that my taste has changed over the years, and I am not in love any more with the main stream Italian way of raising and breeding bird dogs. I have grown to believe that (and this is of course just my opinion) the apex of gundog/birddog breeding and training has been achieved by the Germans, the British/Scottish/Irish and by the Americans at this time. Anyway I digress.
After moving to the US, due to new jobs, kids (one of which with special needs) and integrating in to the culture, my mind was somewhere else and I went through a “bird dog hiatus” that lasted about 8 years (looking back that was 8 years too long without a bird dog). Fortunately in the spring of 2018 one of my friends had an "unplanned" GSP litter and a puppy was available for me. I did not hesitate and went for it. Luckily for me I knew and hunted with both the sire and the dam of my dog and they are excellent hunting dogs. Fran is now almost 2 years old (will be 2 in February). She has been the best hunting dog I have ever had to date.
We spent her first season training first (in the summer) pretty heavily and then hunting her on wild Iowa pheasants with mostly just basic obedience done at that point. At that time I let her rip the country and range out (as far as Iowa small parcels of public land allow). I killed a lot of pheasants over her (also only pointed birds) and doing it this way has allowed her to further her already incredible pray drive, to the point that now I can hardly do anything wrong with my (poor) training abilities, since I have the feeling that she will always be bird obsessed! Additionally I was (and still are) very disciplined about continuing to run her regularly during the off season on wild pheasants as much as the Iowa hunting regulations allow (except from March 15 to July 15 when public areas are closed to dog training in Iowa) supplementing with some game preserve stuff when wild pheasants cannot not be chased.
Anyhow after the first hunting season curiosity made me look in to her background and pedigree. I found out that the mother has a pedigree that is heavy on AKC MH achievements. Additionally all the generations in the father’s pedigree (from the grandparents of my dog going back) have VC NAVDHA titles (each sire and each dam). I did not know all of this when I picked her up back then (I just wanted a good hunting dog, plus she was free), so I consider myself very lucky. This discovery, plus a change of interest in me, made me switch from focusing on hunting with a good dog to get a “gundog training and trial fever” (I think I am infected pretty badly, to the point that I rather train than hunt and I’ll pass shots on birds if my dog is not doing what I am asking her to do).
So after the first season and the pedigree discovery last spring we tried a couple of hunt test and field trials (Mostly derby and puppy stakes) with some decent success and we had a blast! I was even more hooked.
In the summer my family and I went on a long vacation to Italy and Germany and Fran was left with Jim West and Rhonda Haukoos from Wild West Kennels for a month. Jim and Rhonda are incredible people, dog trainers and super hardworking individuals. When I left Fran for their summer camp on the sandhills of Nebraska all I had asked them to do was to let her run on sharptails for the month and half that she was going to be there. When I came back to pick her up, not only had she been run on the sand hills chasing sharptails, but she was also whoa trained and green broke to wing and shot. Jim and Rhonda did an incredible job with my puppy!
After I picked her up I continued her training on my own (following suggestions from Jim and Rhonda). At that point I was back in Iowa from vacation earlier than my wife and kids. My wife teaches so her summers are fully off, hence she stayed in Europe with the kids longer than me to visit her parents which are stationed in Germany at this time. I, on the other hand, had to work!
But having no family duty for a while allowed me to intensify her training during this summer and we were able to go out and train on wild pheasants every day of the week for the whole month of August as well as good part of September. I continued to demand that she would whoa and be steady to wing and shot using my blank pistol. We also started training with pigeons in our back yard and at a local DNR designated dog training areas working on whoa, stop to flush and more wing and shot steadiness. Once wife and kids were back, the school year and other the kids activities started, frequency of training slowed down quite a bit (got to work to pay the bills, kids are going to be little only for so long, etc.). This fall we both hunted and trained. I have been trying to go out field training or hunting 2-3 times a week for about an hr sessions with her. I rather keep my hunting time short (no more than 1hr, that way I can be home for wife and kids) but go out more frequently than the opposite. Hopefully from a training point of view this was and still is a right choice. While in the field I always dedicate part of the time to working on recall, heel, sit and whoa (by this I mean whoa without birds, stop in the field whenever and wherever the word whoa comes out of my mouth). Additionally we yard train 3-4 times a week working on recall, heel, sit and whoa.
While in the field, whether I am hunting or training, I demand that she is steady to wing and shot, and that she stops to any flushing bird that gets up ahead of us and she can see. If we go out hunting and she points a hen pheasant I fire my shotgun in the air and she has to be steady. Right now, doing what I can with the time that I have, I feel she is about to go from green broke to fully broke, but we are still not quite there yet. Indeed if I shoot a rooster and she see it falling she still needs a strong verbal reminder to not move until I send her in for the retrieve. Additionally we have not worked on honoring yet.
I believe though that now that the Iowa pheasant season is about to close and we can start to focus on training exclusively in a more controlled situation I can start to tighten her up on steadiness. I am just not sure that going out 2-3 times a week for the field work is enough for her. What do you think? Is doing more back yard (and DNR designated dog training area) training on whoa and steadiness with, say, my pigeons and then go out a couple of times a week on wild birds or at preserve to translate the yard work to the field enough? I can definitely do the yard work more than the field work, since it is my back yard and I have the birds right there! I mean, I could do the yard work every day (except I can’t shoot my blank pistol because I live in town). The field work is a lot more time consuming and keeps me away from family and other stuff.
My goal with this dog is to run her in AKC amateur gun dog stakes (likely walking trial exclusively), and then once I have completed the force fetching process (she is a natural retriever but she is a bit hard mouthed) and all the retrieving stuff I would like to run her in the AKC MH tests. After that I would attempt than NAVHDA UPT and UT.