Tracking 101--Week Four
The final week of tracking class took us two weeks because it was a holiday weekend and some people couldn't make it. The final lesson involved students laying tracks for each other. The tracks consisted of 75 and 50 yard legs with one wide-angle turn. We tracked in town at the soccer/softball sports complex, which is huge.
At this point, the handlers are still learning how to handle the line and haven't really started paying attention to what their dogs are doing at all. All the dogs in this class have learned to start, to get their heads down, to make a turn on short grass, to find the glove at the end. They've got the very basics that they need to track and now need practice, length, age, different conditions (rain, snow, warm, cold, hills, tall grass, woods, short grass.....)
Things I wish I could cover in more detail include tracklaying, tracklayer's responsibility, reading your dog, line handling, map drawing, analyzing this week's track and planning for next week.
While I've been teaching this class, I've been tracking Charming Billie. She's doing great, is fast and focused, but is the toughest dog to read. When she loses the track, she moves very quickly to try and locate it and although I can tell when she's really on the track (she settles down deep in the harness and moves in a way that's hard to describe, but recognizable), she's still hard to read when she isn't on the track, but trying things. Because she moves so fast, it'd be easy to get way off track by going with her at the wrong moment and being unable to come back. It's probably time to start doing blind tracks with her (where I don't know where the track goes). She's up to at least three corners, an hour or so of age, and about 300 yards. A full TD (the lowest level of tracking test) is 440 to 500 yards, half-hour to two hours old, 3 to 5 turns.