Joe - I live in Bellevue, just across Lake Washington. I am 10 minutes from downtown Seattle. And yeah, the area has changed...3.5 million people will tend to do that to a town. Other than the traffic, Seattle is still the nicest big city in America, though.

I' m currently running just two setters (although I own four)...my stud male and a 7-month old female. The male is 4 years old. He is experienced beyond his age...he gets out some 40-50 days a year...and he has hunted most of North America' s gamebirds. For me and the style of hunting I do, he is nearly the perfect bird dog.

The pup is looking mighty fine so far, and she is showing the same ability to hunt the terrain. I mostly hunt chukar and huns in wide-open spaces, so I tend to let my dogs roll through the country...you find more birds that way. She throttles back nicely when we are down in the brushy draws looking for California Quail. I haven' t had her on grouse yet, because I don' t like my dogs to get the idea that I want them to hunt close to me until I am certain that they will get out when the country opens up. One thing I know for a fact from my experience is that you can always reign in a big-running dog to a certain extent, but you can not make a boot polisher get out farther.

I breed for easy-handling, family-oriented dogs that hunt at a solid medium range and I sell those that hunt closer as started dogs. This doesn' t mean that they are not good bird dogs...quite the contrary. I have one 2-year-old female for sale right now who is super easy-handling, has the best nose and is the best natural retriever that I have ever had. She just won' t break the 100 yard barrier, even in open country, and I need my dogs to be quite a bit farther out than that.