Another great thread! Thanks to all for the input. My lab Ruby (hunter and housepet - I'll never run her in a trial or breed her). There is still a difference between what I WANT her to be and where she IS now, but that's what keeps up busy! LOL!
In her first season, she was just a birdy dog out sniffing around, putting up some birds here and there and more often than not screwing everything up. That was my own failing for lack of training, but we worked hard in the off-season as she matured and by season two she was working within range much better, quartering fields, casting into cover with hand and whistle signals. Much better, but she had the great failing that she would chase a flushed bird for as long as she could see it. Big problem, and very embarassing. We worked hard on that and by her third season I could turn her off a bird in the air with the whistle or "NO BIRD" 100% of the time. We are currently experiencing one significant problem, and that is runners. Unlike a bird in the air, I just can NOT turn her from the hot scent of a running bird. She WANTS to put it in the air so badly that she will not slow down for me. My goal is that she will respond to a whistle-sit (a command that she knows well and obeys under all other situations) even when on the hot scent of a runner that has not flushed. At the moment she is just too damned fast when a bird starts to run, leading to dangerous behaviour like gunners jogging to keep up for the flush, let alone chasing a runner across a road etc... I dont' use an e-collar, so correcting this behaviour is challenging to say the least! I have enlisted the help of a pro dog trainer for this, mostly because he's got a pile of game birds that can be put out in his fields to work on this. Conditions are no good just now - we're up to our knees in crusty snow, but I look forward to working on this with him when conditions improve. For now, I just keep working on whilstle sits at various distances with various stimuli (for example, the .22 cal bumper launcher excites her to NO END, so I steady her, fire that, then stop her on the whiste when I've released her). So my ideal situation would be that she is steady to the whislte under ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, and if we can get there, that's probably steady enough for me (I don't feel strongly that she should be steady on the flush/shot for my purposes, altough I had not previoiusly considered the safety part of the equation - might have to think on that a bit). As far as lost birds go, I have noticed that if she's sitting steady when a duck is shot that she marks the bird better than if she's out on a retrieve or outside of the blind for some reason when a bird goes down. She just seems to concentrate better and takes a better line too the bird than when the shot happens more "randomly" in a less controlled setting. So what I'm saying there is that I don't think that being steady to the flush would cost me many birds - in fact, she may do better overall.
-Crockett