Bubba created the impression of being a naturally versatile bird-getting machine that would find and flush and retrieve upland gamebirds and fetch up any waterfowl he could see fall from the sky. Bought with no paper pedigree and no real background information on his breeding, he was a gun dog with lots of desire, a good nose, and a natural tendency to retrieve. His cooperation, willingness to hunt to the gun, and trainability were hard to evaluate because no one had ever developed these potential traits.

Though I never got to see if Bubba further progressed into a more civilized gun dog, in the following three decades, I have hunted over many English springer spaniels that still show Bubba's enthusiasm, natural hunting abilities, and wide ranging versatility. One of those more recent hunts was with Jen Tuttle, a 26-year-old springer owner, breeder, guide and hunter from Mitchell, South Dakota.

While we were getting ready to go hunting for pheasants and ducks, I told Tuttle my story about hunting with Bubba 35 years ago. She seemed interested, but not worried. "My line of springers probably has Bubba's intensity for finding birds, but my dogs probably are much better trained and under more control than what you saw with Bubba," Tuttle predicted. And she was right.

Kirby, Tuttle's four-year-old male, handled the way springers are described in training books or demonstrated on television shows. He methodically but quickly quartered across a 200-acre field of knee-high pasture grass, stopped and turned on voice and whistle commands, charged hard for spectacular pheasant flushes, and stayed steady to wing, shot, and fall when necessary.

He made one snappy retrieve to hand of a dead rooster, then tracked one broken-wing bird for 300 yards, which he fetched up and brought in without any hesitation. Likewise, on ducks, Kirby hit the water like a Labrador, racing after a wounded greenwing teal that fell in wet slough grass and swimming across a farm pond to pick up a drake wood duck. "All in a day's work," Tuttle said.

Obviously, there are differences between the Bubba-type springer of three decades ago and many of the springers found today. "One big difference I see with today's springer spaniels is that there is more versatility in methods for training this breed," notes Paul McGagh, who is the full-time owner and operator of Glencoe Farm and Kennels south of Bismarck, North Dakota.

McGagh trains up to two dozen springers each year. "Where 35 or so years ago, there were only a few books on training these dogs and just a couple of training programs used for springers, today there are dozens of good instructional manuals and plenty of magazine articles on the subject of training any gun dogs in general and springers in particular," he says.