Learning How To Incorporate Johnny Houses by Matt Morgan

What are a couple of vital factors in this bird dog training game?  Availability of training birds when you are ready to train.  Having a strong flying bird so that a young pup or an old partner show a steady respect for that bird. 

            I was running into both of these problems when doing exposure work for my young, upcoming puppy.  The first day my buddies and I exposed Tucker to quail in the field we ran into a couple of mistakes.  I trusted Tucker to point (without a check cord) and I trusted the quail to fly.  Tucker did point but he also decided that bird staring him in the face was just too tasty to resist.  Of course this particular Bob was suicidal and decided his wings were less than useful any longer.  Bad results happened because of handler and bird error.

            How to remedy this situation? I now have a puppy with catching birds on his mind and a bird supply that is less than reliable when it comes to taking flight.  Lucky for Tucker and I that we stumbled across a gentleman living right down the road from my buddy’s farm.  Gary is this man’s name and training English Pointers is his game.  His wife is a cook and we had gotten her to make us up a couple dozen tamales for our pre quail hunt lunch a few times.  These were some dang good tamales by the way.  That connection led us to their door where Gary was preparing for a training day of his own.  Conversation about what a Pudelpointer is lead to more talk about Tucker’s upcoming Natural Ability Test.  Before I could say tamale, I’d gotten an invite to use Gary’s training grounds. 

            Gary led us out to see how one of his Johnny Houses is set up.  The first house was probably 150 yards from his barn and kennel area.  The house is a simple but effective design, made of 2”x2” wood frame wrapped in a thin plywood, a waterer and feeder attached to the hinged access door, a ledge for the birds to sing on, tin roof, small wire mesh between the ledge and roof, a hinged opening fly out door, a closable funnel for bird reentry, an electronic quail call attached to the outside of the house.  There were probably 10 or so quail in the house when we peaked in on them.  Gary eased open the fly out door and 5-6 birds hopped to the singing ledge then through the fly out door.  These birds scattered 50-100 yards throughout his pines and broomsedge grass landscape.  We closed the funnel entry so these escapees could not reenter just yet.

Gary said one knock on use of a Johnny House is having a bird dog come past it and point a bird that may have perched on the singing ledge.  He has constructed a remedy to prevent just that. A square of pvc pipe and rubber mesh that fits through the fly out door and on top of the ledge so that the birds remaining in the house are prevented from sitting on the ledge while training is occurring.  I didn’t run Tucker on Gary’s quail that day but we did make plans for a future visit.

            Tucker and I did return to expose ourselves to quail that actually liked to fly and live in general.  We rode through the property and released birds from numerous houses.  Gary has 8 total on around 250 acres of his slice of South Georgia Heaven.  He manages this property for quail and bird dog training and it is wonderful.  Several wild coveys are established on this land to go along with the recalling birds.  Once we had released quail from a few houses we returned to the first and put young Tucker on the ground. 

            Tucker learned quickly that these birds weren’t the easy going kind. A move or two after the point and a beautiful wing beating, sometimes heart stopping flush erupted.  Tucker was learning to respect these quail which was our goal.  We visited Gary and his property 4 or 5 mornings and the only payment he would accept for our visits was a hand in washing out his pointer pens and a couple bags of layer pellets I left for his quail under the barn.  He didn’t ask for either but I would have been happy to pay much more.  Tucker got upwards of 20-25 points per visit on these birds. He did run down one bird that Gary pointed out was weak in its flush prior to the catch, still this was much better than the quail to which we originally exposed him.  I was sold on the Johnny Houses and their usefulness.

            Gary sent me a PDF of Johnny House plans that he has used in the past.  My neighbor and I will be building a few of these in the near future for our properties.  Tucker just wrapped up his NAVHDA Natural Ability test this past weekend with a max score Prize 1.  Gary was one of the first people I texted the news of our success, he was happy for us and relayed an invite back for the next step towards Utility.