This isn't your grandfather's Brittany spaniel. In fact, they don't even have the same name anymore: for whatever reason, the "spaniel" part was dropped decades ago. Now they're just Brittanys– "Brit" is the handle most Brittany owners use.

At the moment, I've got three of them: one of my own and two that I'm training. The distaff half of the two trainees is, with only slight exaggeration, a canine rocket. The only time Check isn't running or thinking about birds is when she's sleeping, and I wouldn't bet the ranch on that. She's 25 pounds of pure canine energy, drive and intensity.

And she's not the only one. My buddy Wil Avril also has a bottle-rocket Brit-tany named Nellie, who is almost as fast and probably just as bird crazy as Check. A couple of years ago, when young Nell was a pup, Wil and I headed over the mountains for a Hun hunt. We were going to a spot where Wil had found birds earlier that season.

We put down Nellie with my setter Scarlet. Scarlet, as anyone who has ever seen her hunt will tell you, is no slouch in the running department, and has a few pounds and several more inches of leg than Nellie. But for the next hour, Nellie paced her step for step.

Speed and range alone do not a good bird dog make, but from the Montana prairies to the mountainous Oregon desert, where the limit to what you can hunt is often how far you can see, speed and range are a good start. Granted, at that age Nellie still had to learn to hunt, not just run, and figuring out where the birds were was something she was just learning. But she's come around quite nicely since then and more than lived up to her initial promise. She seems to have settled on a closer range than my wide-ranging setters, but for every guy like me who enjoys hunting over big-going dogs, there are 10 that like moderate to close workers.

Brittanys were probably never designed to be ground burners. But like several other Americanized European breeds, that is increasingly what they have become. That suits me just fine, although it rubs some traditionalists the wrong way. To each his own.

Oddly enough, Juno, Check's brother, who is also in my kennel this summer, is so different from Check that it's hard to believe he's from the same litter. Unlike Check, who is small ("tiny" might be a more apt description), Juno is stocky, big boned, calm, and more methodical in the field–more traditional in build as well as bearing. Like his little sister, however, Juno is obsessed with birds, but he goes about finding them in a matter-of-fact way, and once he flushes one of the pigeons I put down for him every day, he watches with interest as they fly away, then gets back to the work at hand.

My Brittany, Powder, is also built along Juno's lines. At about 42 pounds, she's no speedster, certainly not as fast as Check or Nellie. But despite being consistently outrun by my two rocket-assed setters, Powder consistently holds her own in the field. In fact, her levelheaded, methodical approach to finding game often makes her my top dog, particularly on hard-to-pin birds like pheasants, chukars and ruffed grouse. That, I believe, is a function of her intelligence and memory as much as her natural ability.

Brittanys sometimes seem just to "stop" on point but it's a good bet the bird will be there.

Intelligence, in fact, seems characteristic of the breed. You can, with perhaps marginal justification, level the claim that Brits haven't got superb noses, great range or intensity on point, but nobody who owns one has ever accused them of being stupid.

My neighbor Tana Kradolfer has been breeding a line of superb Brittanys for years.

"I always hear people recommending the breed because they're a great first dog and so easy to train," she says. "And while I think that is true in a lot of cases…the ones that aren't can be some of the tougher dogs to train because they're so smart and so manipulative. They're so good at playing off your emotions that they get out of doing something because they're able to put on a big act." For the record, Kradolfer doesn't entirely agree with my observation that the dogs are getting smaller, and says she's got several 50-pound males in her kennel. The standard is between 30 and 40 pounds.

Either way, breeders with Kradolfer's dedication benefit all the rest of us. The vast majority of hunters in this country want a dog that hunts moderately close to the gun, finds birds and fetches the ones they shoot. Although the trend in the U.S. is toward fast, bigger-running dogs, by and large Brittanys are still moderately close-working animals, but their pizzazz quotient is definitely on the upswing.