Hunting season is in full swing, and we hope you are all getting your dogs plenty of time out there on wild upland birds and waterfowl. While we do our best to simulate real world situations in our training & testing during the off-hunting season, there is no substitute for wild birds in natural settings for your dog’s development.
While NAVHDA International does not track individual chapter membership numbers, Minnesota NAVHDA is likely the largest chapter in NAVHDA with over 300 members, and we are verified as holding the most testing days of any chapter the last few years. In 2022, we held TWENTY test days over eight weekends. Thank you to all of our members and volunteers for supporting that effort! We are going to keep up our testing capacity in 2023 to keep meeting the demand for testing slots.
Being a very large and active chapter, Minnesota NAVHDA and its board of directors meets year-round to stay on top of planning and administrative duties to make sure our members have adequate training & testing opportunities. To ensure we have birds, grounds, judges, clinic leaders, test secretaries & coordinators, etc…most of our schedule is planned 9-12 months in advance, and our testing & training birds are all already contracted out for 2023. Here is a snapshot of what we have planned so far for 2023:
WEEKEND CLINICS
| February 4-5 | Force Fetch/Advanced Obedience Clinic | Hooley Hall Stillwater |
| June 3-4 | NAVHDA AIMS Clinic | Kelley Farms |
| June 24-25 | NAVHDA Invitational Clinic | Kelley Farms |
TENTATIVE TEST DATES
| May 13-14 | Natural Ability | Four Brooks |
| June 3-4 | UPT & UT | Kelley Farms |
| July 23-24 | Natural Ability | Four Brooks |
| August 19-20 | NA-UPT-UT | IRRC Virginia |
| August 26-27 | UPT & UT | Four Brooks |
| September 9-10 | Natural Ability | Four Brooks |
There will also be some weekly winter Obedience classes again that will be announced probably in mid to late November. These will start in January.
Members will be notified by email when registrations are open for our 2023 events.
One thing we are also aware of is that we have a lot of new members with young dogs/puppies that perhaps are not getting the exposure opportunities they need. We have been strongly encouraging members to form their own small training groups, but we understand this can be difficult for new members. For 2023, we are looking into doing some larger chapter “open” training days (perhaps monthly in May, June, July, August) where we have a variety of stations and training/exposure opportunities for members and their dogs. If we are going to be able to pull this off, we will need a lot of help from you members! Please watch for more communication about this over the winter.
Enjoy your hunting season!
