Super Storm Liz won the Amateur Shooting Dog stake at the Mountain View BDC event held at the Murphy Farm, Lake Ariel, PA on September 24, 2022.
Liz’s win is especially gratifying to us as over the summer she experienced a severely broken tail. While we don’t know what caused the break, there was a time after more than a month of the tail not responding to treatment that we were all but resigned she would never be able to compete in field trials again. This was quite a bitter pill to swallow as Liz has had such a spectacular career as a derby and our hopes for her were sky high. But now, just in the last days/week we saw glimmers of her tail that had hung limp behind her for well over a month beginning to be held up straight again.
At Mountain View, Liz buzzed around the course, hitting the heavy cover hard and opening up when the cover lessened and the opportunity to reach out presented itself. He was very hard driving, leaving us a bit scared for more damage to her tail. As she drove through the cover she was hunting with determined application. At 15 and 20 she had point called for her and when we found her we were holding our breath to see how her tail looked. She did not disappoint as her tail was absolutely straight and at 10:30 on the one find and 11:30 on the other. As Liz went across the dirt road that separates the south part of the course from the finish on the north end of the farm, she was ripping, putting her athletic body into high geaIt might be a bit of an obsession to be so concerned with a bird dog’s tail but its a part of judging a bird dog