When it comes to training with real feathers, one bird stands tall among all of them in my mind: the lowly pigeon. Pigeons are valuable for many reasons—in some scenarios they even work better than gamebirds such as pheasants.

Introducing a Puppy to Feathers

Pigeons can figure into your pre-season training over the course of your dog’s whole life. However, let’s start at the beginning. When a pup is as young as eight or nine weeks you can introduce a pigeon wing to unlock excitement about feathers. A wing is fun to chase, it smells interesting, and it can’t fight back or slap a puppy in the face.

Begin by teasing your pup with a wing by dragging it in front of your dog’s nose to entice them to run after it. Next, tie the wing to the end of a string and scamper it along the ground. An old fishing rod with some decoy line works great for this. Let your youngster chase it around and catch it, but make sure your pup has to work for it. The lesson is that feathers are fun, fun, fun, thereby setting the stage for more formal training later.

Letting your pup catch the wing keeps the excitement level ramped up, unlocks “prey drive,” and burns into your pup’s mind that it needs to keep after moving targets even when they aren’t easy to catch. This is a valuable concept that will prove beneficial when encountering complex challenges later on—such as, trying to catch a wounded rooster pheasant on the run.

How to Introduce Pigeons in Puppy Training

After a successful introduction to chasing the wing, you’re now ready to introduce a frozen pigeon. I like to do some short, fun tosses in the yard when a pup is 12 to 16 weeks old. Using a frozen bird will help lessen the chance your pup will want to chomp down and squeeze. This is a common tendency with a soft, warm, fresh-killed pigeon and can lead to rough handling of gamebirds as your dog gets older.

Note that chasing the wing and fetching the frozen pigeon are nothing more than introductory steps, and you shouldn’t do them every day. It’s all about unlocking the desire to chase and catch real birds. You must include a variety of training dummies in your sessions. If your dog gets a steady diet of birds only, you might create a motivational problem when it’s time to retrieve objects that your dog regards as less exciting.

The next step, which is to introduce a clipped-wing pigeon, ramps up the excitement considerably. A “clip wing” is a pigeon from which you’ve removed the longest flight feathers on the wing. A clip wing can flutter, but it can’t fly any great distance, so your dog will be able to chase it down. You want your dog to always believe that it can catch a bird. This is what leads to good, aggressive flushes on wild birds.

Hunting Simulation with Pigeons

It’s important that you don’t get so fixated on training with real birds that you let other facets of your dog’s development slide. Everything I’ve described up to this point is meant to build excitement about real birds. Prey drive won’t wane just because you don’t let your dog chase real birds every day. Work on sharpening up obedience, compliance, and in-the-field commands such as stopping on the whistle, hunting in range, and coming when called.

You’ll realize some clear advantages of training with pigeons as your pup matures and you want to take the next steps toward real hunting. Planting a live pigeon in cover and working your dog into the wind (or a crosswind) until it finds the bird and flushes it is exactly what a developing upland flushing dog needs. A pigeon planted in cover won’t run. A dog will either catch it on the ground or force it to fly so you can shoot it. Either of those is a good outcome.

Pheasants and chukar can be trickier to work with because of their tendency to run and then flush out of range. This might be a matter of too much too soon for a young dog. It's better to get some flush-shoot-retrieve success with predictable pigeons that will build confidence, then introduce the gamebirds later.

If you can catch pigeons in a silo or barn, you’ll be saving some money on your bird bills. Even if you have to purchase them (lots of pigeon sellers advertise online), you’ll be way ahead compared to buying pheasants, chukar, or ducks from a game farm. Yes, you’ll want to use these birds at some point, so your dog learns how to handle larger game, but pigeons hold all the advantages in the early stages of training.

How to Plant Pigeons

I’m often asked about the best methods to plant a pigeon when doing hunting simulations. A pigeon that’s too dizzy and tucked too tightly into the cover might not fly. On the other hand, a pigeon that is highly alert, or in cover that’s too open, might fly away before your dog has a chance to locate and flush it. You want to learn how to plant them “just right.” Here’s how I do it.

I pick the location in the field where I want my dog to encounter bird scent; keeping in mind that I’ll want to work my dog into the wind or into a crosswind. A little piece of orange flagging marks the spot so I don’t lose track of where I hid the bird. Before I put the pigeon down, I stomp the grass down a bit in front of where the bird will be facing.

To dizzy the pigeon, I grab it around the breast, hold it upside down, and spin it. Think of copying the rapid motion you’d use to whisk a bowl of eggs. The goal is to disorient the pigeon, not to put it to sleep. With a little practice, you’ll get a good sense of when the bird is getting woozy but is still awake and alert. One sign is that the bird isn’t fighting to flap its wings; it just becomes limp.

I then tuck the pigeon into a pocket of grass with the wind at its back. If the cover is a little thin, I’ll use a couple handfuls of grass to better cover the bird’s back. Very slowly, I’ll loosen my grip on the bird and slowly pull my hand back. If the bird tries to stand up, I know I didn’t dizzy it enough and will need to start over. As long as the bird doesn’t move, I’ll quietly back away. At this point the pigeon has no reason to be startled or try to fly.

The pigeon won’t sit there indefinitely. But as long as it’s not spooked, you have a good 10 to 15 minutes to go get your dog, guide it back and forth through the cover, and get it into the scent area. Once your dog hones in on the bird, it will charge in to try and catch its prey. If all goes well, the pigeon will be alert enough to see the dog bearing down on it and will flush.

It’s quite possible that your dog is a speed demon and catches the bird. Or maybe the pigeon is still too lethargic and doesn’t take to the air in time. This is still a worthwhile exercise. Remember, you always want your dog to believe it can catch the bird.

Using Pigeons to Teach a Dog to Track

A dead pigeon is also ideal for introducing trailing exercises that could simulate trying to catch up to an elusive bird that is zigzagging in the cover, or tracking down a wounded bird that’s on the run. I’ll take a fresh-killed pigeon, tie it to an 8-foot string, and drag it as I walk out into the cover. I prefer to do this in the morning when there’s some moisture in the air and dew on the grass. If it’s dry, I’ll wet the bird down before I drag it. Anything to help scenting conditions will be beneficial as you encourage your young dog to find the trail and stay on it.

As soon as your dog gets to the end of the trail and finds its prize, heap on the praise. You want to keep the excitement level maxed out. While finding a dead bird might not be as much fun as flushing a live one, using a real bird always trumps a training dummy.

Another variation on this is to do the drag with a dead bird, but then also plant a live bird a few steps beyond the end of the trail. Now your dog is getting rewarded with a flush, shot, and retrieve. This is not unlike a successful tracking job on a wily rooster.

Pigeons might not carry the status of other training bird options. However, they’re easy to work with, comparatively inexpensive, and to my way of thinking, they're perfect for getting your dog amped up on feathers.