Ajax is obsessed with birds. Anything with wings, actually – even moths (he’ll point at those). Today he’s nine months old, and I’ve had him for a bit over two months. Every morning when I take him for a walk in the local forest, he rushes around pointing at blackbirds, pigeons, woodpeckers or anything else with feathers that he sees or smells. He’s grabbed two baby blackbirds in the garden. (I wasn’t thrilled about that, nor was Ari, who took the last one away from him and brought it to us, probably expecting us to help considering his upset behavior.)

Yesterday I was coming back from a long walk in the woods with the dog, and Ajax was carrying a tennis ball that he had been retrieving. Suddenly he stopped, dropped the ball and pointed at the bushes. Crept forward slowly and pointed again. Then pounced. A pigeon exploded from the bush, and Ajax leaped after it, knocking it out of the air with his paw. It flew up again and he leaped and grabbed it in his jaws and brought it directly to me. It was alive and lively, and at first I thought it was undamaged. Then the blood sprayed from its mouth all over me and it was dead. It’s a fat bird; if I knew how to prepare it there would be a good meal to come of it.

Happy 4th of July,  everybody!  To celebrate, we have new pictures from Mona Lisa  – all the pups opened their eyes a few days ago and have begun to bark (they’re barking for Barack, of course!). Everybody is freshly bathed with new ribbons and manicures. Now they’re ready to start exploring the big wide world!

Mona Lisa sent us some more photos of the puppies today – their eyes are beginning to open now, so it won’t be long before they’ll be active and into everything within reach!

We got a lovely note from Mona Lisa about the puppies today:

 ”Have not weighed the pups yet, but I bet we’ve reached 1 kg today. They are very well, very quiet, just lying there content and growing.

Two days ago they began using their hind legs instead of just crawling with them dragging behind, and when you look at their eyes, you see movements and that the muscles around the eyelids are working. It should not be too long now before their eyelids begin to open and we shall get a glimpse of milky white corneas.
Once they can see, they will be much more active and we will begin to see some individuality. Yesterday the rose puppy was lying exactly like the brown one in the corner sleeping.
Attached is a photo from yesterday: which puppy is missing?
It was lying flat out on its belly in the corner.”

All 3 boys and 2 of the girls - June 24, 2009

I am counting down the weeks until it is finally August 8, when I go to Denmark  with Ari to meet the puppies in person and bring home Barack! Ari’s breeder Lies van Essen, who owns Quodian’s Vizsla Kennel in St. Willebrord, Holland, will be meeting me there to help me pick out Barack – I am really looking forward to seeing her again! She is also getting one of Ari’s puppies!

We continue to receive charming updates of puppy photos from Mona Lisa – all six (three boys, three girls) are doing well, and their mother has recovered nicely. In one of the pictures, Wagga is enjoying the flowers from Ari. These photos are from June 20th, and the one of the little guy in what looks like an incredibly uncomfortable sleeping position from the 23rd. The puppies are 9 days old already!

Mona Lisa sent us new pictures of Wagga’s and Ari’s puppies – they are two days old! Aren’t they gorgeous?

We also wanted to announce that Ari’s breeder, Lies van Essen, the owner of Quodian’s Wirehaired Vizsla Kennel in St. Willebrord, The Netherlands, has just produced a fantastic litter with Ari’s mother, Cegledi Serif Apc (Yenny) and Quodian’s Yoker, a wonderful young male. (We know the proud mother and father personally and they are both gorgeous dogs with fantastic characters!) Yenny is a beautiful and marvelous hunting dog with a very sweet and loving nature, and Yoker is a bundle of energy who, however, is very gentle and considerate with small creatures of all kinds, whether two- or four-legged!  This litter fulfills the breed regulations of the Dutch Vizsla Society. For the right owners there are still a few puppies available. A small gallery of pictures of the four-week-old puppies can be seen below; there are also more pictures and further information at www.quodians.nl

After the good news about the birth of the six puppies, we spent the day grinning and passing out dried beef tendons as treats to Ari’s friends. (Most dogs don’t smoke, so we decided to skip the cigars. It’s a disgusting habit anyway.) Wagga is recovering nicely, and Mona Lisa sent this picture of her with all six puppies as an update:

Wagga had her litter today! There are 6 puppies in total – 3 boys and 3 girls, ranging in weight from 412 to 510 grams. The first three came naturally, but Wagga’s contractions were quite weak, and so a Caesarean section was necessary to deliver the last three. As soon as Mona Lisa saw that Wagga was having trouble, she raced off with her to Frederikshavn (a 15-minute drive)  to the veterinarian, a lovely man with 40 years of experience. Mother and puppies are all well – Wagga and Mona Lisa are of course very tired, having been up all night! And Wagga is a bit grumpy, what with having her tummy slit open and then having to deal with 6 screaming kids. (I could hear them in the background when I talked to Mona Lisa on the phone just now )
We are really looking forward to seeing the puppies! More pictures will follow soon – the current one was taken around 9 this morning and shows Wagga with her first three puppies – two girls and a boy. We are thrilled to pieces! Congratulations to Wagga and Mona Lisa! Ari is busy passing out dried beef tendons (Ochsenziemer)  to all his buddies to celebrate (and he got a new lamb bone this morning, too!)

Since our Wire-haired Vizsla, Quodians Aristos, joined the family a bit over a year ago, I’ve developed a growing interest in hunting dogs and hunting which has only been reinforced by the Deutsch Drahthaar, Ajax, who joined our household at the end of April.

In August I’ll start studying for my German hunting license. This isn’t something I had anticipated doing before; hunting is not part of my family tradition, and I’m the sort who is more likely to try to save whales and hug trees. At the same time, I have seen the unfortunate effects of hunting bans from California to Berlin, where the efforts of well-meaning animal protection advocates lead to cougars munching small children and joggers and dangerous wild boar wandering around in city traffic.

The German approach to hunting licensure has a very healthy part of intelligent wildlife and habitat management in it. And dogs represent a vital part of the efforts to ensure a humane hunt as well as track animals injured on the roads, for example. They undergo strict testing to ensure that the responsibilities of animal protection are met during the hunt or in tracking for whatever purpose.

Because of my new interest, I’ve been doing a lot of reading of German texts on hunting and kynology. Despite being reasonably fluent in German, I have encountered a lot of new terms which I have to look up or ask others to explain. There are also some interesting translation projects under discussion which will require a good mastery of Waidmannssprache (“hunter-speak”) in particular. So with that in mind, I’ve done a bit of research on possible online and offline terminology resources, which is listed below for the benefit of anyone with similar interests or needs.

Hardcopy dictionaries:

Elsevier’s Dictionary of Nature and Hunting in English, French, Russian, German and Latin.

Elsevier’s Dictionary of the World’s Game and Wildlife in English, Latin, French, German, Dutch and Spanish With Equivalents in Afrikaans and Kiswahi.

Wörterbuch der Weidmannssprache für Jagd- und Sprachfreunde – A monolingual German book explaining hunters’ terminology

Wörterbuch der Weidmannssprache – Another monolingual German book explaining hunters’ terminology

Online glossaries:

Jagdwörterbuch – a nice little lookup tool that shows “normal” German, the English term and the special German hunting terminology.

Waidmanssprache – A monolingual German reference explaining hunters’ language.

WebTerm hunting dog terms – A fairly sophisticated taxonomy of terms in German and English. I think it uses MultiTerm Online, and it doesn’t work very well with the Firefox, though all functions seem to be OK with Internet Explorer.

Jagd und Wild Wörterbuch – Sloppy but possibly useful. There are serious problems with the English spelling and capitalization in the octolingual glossary. The sorting function is nice. This looks like another one where Internet Explorer may be necessary; I looked at it in a Firefox tab too, and the scroll bar wasn’t visible and sorting didn’t work.

The other resources I found were too awful to list. If anyone else knows of good terminology resources for German in this area, I’d like to hear about them.