Partial Lecture Excerpt from Week 1:
Setting up yourself up for success is all about making sure that you are picking the right search area for the objective that you are trying to achieve. A lot of times, we get very tempted to just go anywhere and look at a "cool" search area and just start setting hides. That could be a whole lot of fun but it comes down to really just practice versus training.
Practice is repetition. Repetition is not always a good thing! When you have repetition, you create reinforcement history. And… One of the most important things to remember is that you get what you reinforce. So if we continue to practice in a random way, the best we can do is get random results. Picture this… Let's say you are trying to get good at archery. But instead of actually aiming at the bull's-eye, you just point your bow in the general direction of the target. How often do you think you will actually hit the bull's-eye? You may occasionally… But it would be sheer luck. That's kind of what we're doing when we go to a search area and just set out “cool” hides. In this course, you will start to think about your search areas in a new and different way so that you can start to set hides in a way that will help you to achieve your training objective. We are going to learn all about airflow and how air bends and moves within the environment. That understanding will help us to become better trainers…. Not just “practicers”.
One of the first things you need to pay attention to is wind direction. A lot of times we can use things like flagging tape or even just look at the direction our hair is blowing in the wind. In the moment, that's not actually a bad idea! When I was setting hides down in Florida over the winter, I would look at the Spanish moss to see what direction the wind was blowing. If we have a specific objective however we may want to do some more advance planning.
Something that we will get into a little bit more in other parts of this class is the concept of the difference between macro and micro weather and air movement. Both matter! Our macro weather has to do with the prevailing wind. Prevailing wind is the general direction in which the air will move (big picture). We need to understand this information so that we can predict what the air movement will look like as it wraps around buildings and structures within the search area. Once we have that macro view we can start to take a closer look and start to understand what the airflow is doing in our specific search area or at the actual hide itself. But more about that later.
Before we get started, we want to make sure that we can predict the direction of the prevailing wind. If we have this information, it can help us to figure out exactly where we want to set our search area. Once we understand the prevailing wind, we can get a general understanding of what the odor will do depending upon the time of day, amount of sun, and other weather parameters so that we can make a good decision about selecting a search area.
There are a couple of apps that you may want to look into to help to predict wind direction on a daily or even hour by hour basis. A couple of apps that you might want to look into is MyRadar, WindCompass, or Windometer. Availability might vary depending on your operating system. MyRadar has the ability to predict the prevailing wind on an hour by hour basis but only on the Android platform. Those of us who use Apple, have to be happy with the forecast for the day! However, it’s pretty accurate! I have also used the WindCompass app because it will tell me what the wind is doing at that moment.
If you have an idea of where you might want to search, you can use Google Earth to start to plan your training session. When you determine which direction is North, you can get a pretty good idea of what the air flow might be in your given search area. I even did this at a recent trial!
To give an example, I used MyRadar to assess the prevailing wind direction for the first day of my most recent Summit trial. MyRadar told me that the wind would be coming from the North East direction. Then I went to Google Earth to get a satellite picture of the area where we would be trialing. Yes, you can do this the night before! With this information, I had a pretty good understanding of what the airflow might actually do in the search area while I was searching the next day. We will be talking a lot later about how airflow moves around buildings so that you can get pretty good at making some assumptions about airflow. Very interestingly, I was absolutely correct and was able to use this information to put in a very successful search. This screenshot is from my actual trial prep. The bank and barber shop doors were open and part of the search. Because of this analysis, I didn't get trapped in the bank in swirling odor because I knew that it was likely coming from another location!
Although you don't always have to use apps or Google Earth when planning your training, you might want to give it a try! In fact, I would like you to give it a shot this week. Here's an example…
On April 1, 2023, the prevailing wind for Washington New Jersey is forecasted to be coming from the southwest direction. It also looks like it's going to be quite gusty! Here's a screenshot from the MyRadar app from my phone. I am using this as a example because we can use Google Earth to get our next piece of information (and I know the area!)
Here is a Google Earth image of the Meadow Breeze Park in Washington New Jersey. The parking lot is south west of the baseball fields. You can see the compass in the bottom right that shows the red arrow that points north. With that compass and the information from MyRadar we can assume that the direction of the wind will follow (in general) the direction of the yellow arrow. We can start to use this information to think about what we might want to do during a training session. Now of course you might be thinking that this is a whole lot of work… But even if you don't do it all the time, it is really good practice to get you into the mindset of planning. You might also find that your training sessions become way more powerful!
Let's say that my training objective is to get more experience in learning how to read my dog when my dog is an odor but far away from source. When the odor is diffuse and scent cone is wide, my dog will start to give me a in odor behavior that is different than when my dog is close to the location of the hide. If that was my objective for the training, this might be an interesting set up. For instance, if I were to set a hide in the bleachers close to the parking lot (denoted by the red X) and start my dog searching over by the trees in the top right corner of the photo, I would try to pay attention to when my dog actually got into odor. Then as my dog approached the bleachers on the top right (denoted by the blue circle), my dog may start to work that set of bleachers because my dog should be an odor at that point… in this case, my dog would be working “diffuse odor away from source”. Keep it in mind of course that when we are searching for essential oil our scent cone is quite large! Of course to do this set up, I may want to age the hide for at least an hour or two to get the full effect.
You can see how doing this helps to lay out a structured training session so that your training is not haphazard. Picture going to this park and setting the hide and letting it age while you went off to do errands or something. Then you get back to the park have a well laid plan to be able to run the search with the objective of being able to observe your dog when they encounter odor on an unproductive side of bleachers that is downwind from the hide but set in a way where the dog may not be able to make a direct line to the hide. Here you can see that the tall fencing around the baseball field would impede the dog from leaving that side of the bleachers and going directly to the hide. What an excellent exercise! Would we necessarily figure this out if we just showed up at the park and set a cool hide? Probably not!
Instructor: Stacy Barnett
