Hatch Watching

I know it doesn't make any difference, but at this time of year I pay extra attention to the weather.  The number of birds we'll have this summer for training and next fall for hunting is in part dependent on the weather during the hatching time.  Hopefully very few birds were hatched out up here last week.  It rained all week with some local flooding of streams and rivers.  The week ended with snow Friday night into Saturday morning.  In fact, I picked up the family at the airport Friday night and there was snow on 93 in a number of places coming north.  Franconia Notch had so much snow the plows had been out.  Fortunately north of the mountains we didn't get any accumulating snow.  We did have frost Saturday and Sunday nights.

This week the weather has become more seasonable and will be downright summer like by the end of the week.  The conventional wisdom here in the North Country is that we should be ok.  In a normal year our birds don't really hatch out until about this time and considering the lateness of the spring the hatch should be a little late this year.  It will be a while before we start finding broods in our training covers and will know for sure.

Here at the kennel the dogs are getting worked on a regular basis and the two sets of puppies are still tractable enough that they can be run in pairs.  The Moon puppies had a grouse encounter yesterday as they were the first out on the puppy loop.  When the Jack puppies went out on a larger loop we could here the grouse drumming not far from where it had been flushed on the first go-around.

Grouse eggs from a nest we found last year.