RJ Online Feature: The Mysteries of Scent
Steve Smith
Jake, who does most of the work around here, and I were on a family pheasant hunt more than 20 years ago, a gathering in the Thumb of Michigan where the birds were still in numbers that made an all-day hunt worthwhile. Jake was in his very early teens and had never shot a wild pheasant, and he was anxious to fill that hole in his resume.
As we reached the end of a cornfield, it started to drizzle, the sky overcast, when a rooster cackled into the air on Jake’s side of the line. He dropped the bird with a single shot, and he sprinted toward where it had come down. Our black Lab, Maggie, was already on the job, and I figured it would be no time until she picked it up. But nothing. Maggie had, the day before, trailed a crippled runner more than a quarter mile through a grass field and into a farm woodlot where she caught the bird. She knew the game.
But still no bird for Jake.
The rest of us, my father and my other son Chris, joined in. Maggie was convinced the bird hadn’t stuck around, and even my English setter Jess looked at me like I was crazy when I told her to hunt dead. Then I saw the tip of the bird’s tail under some thick grasses where it had crawled with its last bit of life. I pulled the bird out, held it up so the dogs could see it, and handed it to Jake, his face split in a wide grin. I then gave myself credit for the retrieve. Both dogs had walked over the bird several times, actually stepping on it, but their wonderful noses told them nothing.
Sometimes it’s like they have no nose at all. Sometimes your eyes are better than their nose. We’ve all heard about the number of scent receptors wrapped up in a dog’s nose, that the sense of smell of even a so-so canine is, depending on what they are scenting, many times that of a human. Hunting dogs, hounds and pointing dogs in particular, are bred for their noses. Retrievers not so much. Retrievers have to do so much more in their hunting careers than do pointing dogs, that things like eyesight and memory and disposition and intelligence are as important as the nose. On average, however, a canine nose has 220 million scent receptors compared with 5 million in a human nose. (Can you imagine what that steak you’re barbecuing on the grill smells like to Old Boscoe who’s sitting nearby, remembering that in 1998 you dropped a bratwurst in this very spot and he was there?)
But that doesn’t make them slouches in the olfactory department (I used to tell my biology students the easy way to remember that “olfactory” meant smell was to have them think of a “smelly ol’ factory”). Retrievers are used as cadaver dogs and search-and-rescue dogs – some of the first dogs on the scene after the 9/11 attacks were search-and-rescue Labs – and the retriever breeds are often used in drug- and bomb-detection work as well. There are even a few that can detect cancer and oncoming epileptic seizures; I refuse to believe they are psychic – my guess is it’s the nose. Up to one-third of a dog’s brain is devoted to the sense of smell.
But what of those times when you swear your dog couldn’t smell a bird if it moved in with him? Pointing dog people worry about scent more than the retriever folks do and have a tendency to talk about “scenting conditions” more often. They are more concerned with air scent and less with ground scent.
While there is some scenting that takes place in waterfowling, of course, the eyes are the main tool for a working retriever when ducks or geese are the game, though of course if a wounded bird makes it to cover, the dog’s going to naturally use his nose. Retrievers in the uplands, though, use their noses as their main source of information, and they work off both kinds of scent, ground and air. I know a couple trainers who claim that air scent and ground scent are differentiated by the dog, and on some days, the conditions may be better for air scent than ground scent and vice versa. The physiological makeup of the dog’s apparatus is beyond what I’m trying to do here, and frankly they’re a little above my pay grade – I’ll leave the explanations either to Dr. Ben Character, our vet columnist, or I refer you to Dr. Martin Coffman’s article (RJ April/May 2006). Cliff’s Notes version: Dogs have great scenting equipment, but sometimes it just flat doesn’t work.
The air scent, ground scent thing reminds me of one time in South Dakota when Roxie the Rocket and I were both
a lot younger with Dave Meisner and his great Elhew pointer Gilly (Elhews have the best nose of all pointing breeds, according to some; there may be faster ways of starting a fight at a dog club than saying that, but I can’t think of one right now).
Anyway, it was a windy day as it so often is on the plains in November, and Gilly locked up on point in some thick weeds near a ditch at the edge of a picked cornfield. A rooster jumped and Dave dropped it, and Rox was there for the pick-up. Gilly made a quick pass through the cover, head high, and then went on. Rox came back to the patch, put her nose on the ground, and rousted four hens and two roosters into the air, one of which I invited to dinner. Gilly evidently had been able to get enough air scent for only one point, while Rox was able to find enough ground scent to locate a half-dozen birds that were still in there.
This is not all that unusual; those who hunt pointing breeds and retrievers together, as I often do, sometimes find that one dog seems to be producing all the birds – one day it’s the flusher, one day the pointing dog. It may be that the days of good scenting for both conditions are few in number. I’ve had days where my pointer Sam is nailing birds at great distances, yet Rox has no idea there’s a bird in the ownship. And some days Sam runs right by a bird that Rox, moving slower and hunting more thoroughly, will push into the air. The explanation could be that there are days when they can be hammerheads, but it happens too often to be coincidence. Though they are often hammerheads.
What kind of difficult days are we talking about? Well, we know that wind can be a bugaboo, often sweeping scent from the cover before the dog arrives, or at the very least making it difficult to locate the source. Drop a smoldering cigar in the grass (don’t burn the place down) on even a breezy day, and the movement of the smoke can give you at least some idea of what a dog has to deal with.
Likewise, dry conditions, the air holding little humidity that can carry scent particles, are tough on dogs. But I’ve seen dogs in Montana and in the Southwest adapt very nicely to ultra-dry weather and cover; they just learn that even with the bird very close, they are likely to get only a whiff of scent. A dog’s scenting apparatus has to stay moist to work; dry weather dries them out and hurts that, too, so watering the dog often is not just good for his health, it helps him do what you bought and trained him for. I think most of us realize that when a dog is running with his mouth wide open, he’s not breathing – and therefore not scenting – through his nose. It would follow, then, that still, damp days would be the best, and so they seem to be. I’ve seen wet days
when the scenting is so good, the dog can smell a bird sitting downwind in a breeze. But a downpour isn’t good, either.
A live bird gives off one type of scent, but a wounded one or a dead one must smell different. Our flushing retrievers are going to try to grab every bird, dead or alive, but pointing dogs point live birds, catch wounded ones and retrieve dead ones, and they can tell the difference. And how about this – the dog that points a live bird he comes across as he’s retrieving a dead bird to his handler. How does he catch the vague scent of a live bird while his mouth is full of the scent of the dead one? It must be like walking into the kitchen on Thanksgiving and being able to smell both the turkey and the pumpkin pie in the oven. I’ve seen it often enough that it isn’t a surprise anymore. One setter I hunted perdiz behind in Uruguay would hunt for the next bird while still carrying the last shot bird. Then, when he established point on another of the little native partridge (actually, a member of the rhea family), he’d turn and – patooey! – spit the dead one out.
What about the bird you absolutely stoned, it drops, you saw it come down – maybe you can even see it – and the dog can’t find it. On a clear, cool, damp opening day last year, I shot a woodcock where the woods met a grassy field, the bird towering to my right and high. The shot was maybe 30 yards, which is a long shot indeed on a woodcock. I saw the bird drop straight down onto some brown oak leaves and bounce. Rox, having seen it fall, headed for the bird… and couldn’t find it. I waited, then strolled over to help. The bird’s cryptic coloration was such a perfect match for the leaves that I figured I wouldn’t spot it, so I started scuffing the leaves with my feet and I eventually kicked it – and Rox pounced on it and sat to deliver it like she’d done something epic. What happened?
There’s a phenomenon that we hear about, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it makes sense, that birds get “air-washed” when they are shot dead and drop from any sort of height. When a bird dies, logically, the scent should start to diminish, though it would take hours and probably days to completely dissipate. As the bird falls, the scent that it has is washed off it by the air, and since the bird is dead and not, in effect, “making” fresh scent, it gets hard to smell quite quickly. I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen many air-washed birds that were not high-flyers, and I really can’t, so there may be something to it.
Anybody who tells you he understands all the nuances of scenting will also, eventually, try to sell you a bridge. But you can go by a few basics. One is, if your dog is hunting dead in an area where you’ve dropped a bird, let him hunt and stay out of the area until you’re sure he’s checked every square inch. Your scent will only add to his problems.
If you’re working with a young dog, be very patient… I mean very patient when he’s looking for a downed bird. He’s inexperienced, may not know exactly what he’s looking for, and the X factor may be that the scenting is bad that day or in that place, and even an experienced dog would have a problem. But since he’s a pup and new to the entire enterprise, the natural inclination is to blame him, your training, or both. But he may be doing what we are here – trying to make sense out of scent.
“The Mysteries of Scent” by Steve Smith originally appeared in the June/July 2008 issue of The Retriever Journal. This back issue is available in our online Storefront.