On February 15th, Minnesota NAVHDA held its annual meeting via a virtual teleconference. You can see the full meeting minutes here.
For our 2022 Fundraiser, we are excited to announce a raffle in conjunction with one of our new sponsor partners-The Upland Gun Company. You can read all about the raffle here. Tickets will be sold at our events throughout the training & testing season.
As I am writing this, the 15 day forecast unfortunately does not look to be indicating any signs of an early spring. Spring will come, though, and we are anxiously waiting to get started on our outdoor training and our 2022 testing season. To help meet demand, we expanded our tests to 18 days over 8 weekends this year. This will likely be an all time record for any chapter in NAVHDA. We can only pull this off with the help of our member volunteers. Please consider volunteering at our training clinics and tests this year. You find contact information for event coordinators here.
We still have room in our 2022 NAVHDA Aims & Rules Clinic on June 4th & 5th. This year’s clinic leader is Blaine Carter from Maine. Blaine has been involved in NAVHDA for almost 50 years. He is a tremendous wealth of knowledge and presents it in his own unique way-complete with that Maine accent! Take advantage of this unique opportunity.
TESTING: 6 of our 8 Test weekends are full with wait lists, but we do still have room for UPT & UT dogs in our Aug 27-28 test and NA dogs at our Sept 10-11 tests at Four Brooks. Full Test Calendar and details are here.
TRAINING: We highly encourage our members to form their own small training groups, and we will help support that with access to birds and grounds. If you need help getting into a weekly small training group, please fill out our Training Survey. We anticipate bird deliveries and training will get ramped up the last week of April. Our first large training clinic event will be April 30th. There will be a MOCK NA test (already full) and in conjunction we will be debuting a couple new courses and an OPEN training day. See the details of Versatile Dog 101 and Versatile Dog 201 here. These are FREE to members and no registration is required.
HELP NEEDED-FOUR BROOKS TRAINING: We are still looking for volunteers to organize training at Four Brooks. Not looking for “trainers” so to speak, just individuals who can be a group leader and organize communication and bird wrangling for the group. If you can help please email: training@mnnavhda.org
GROUNDS PASSES: Unless you are attending a Chapter sponsored Test or Clinic you must have a Pass to be on our two primary training grounds.
- FOUR BROOKS (Milaca) -**NEW FOR 2022** We will be selling Grounds Passes to Four Brooks online this year. You can get your 2022 Pass here. When you complete the payment process, you will get an email to print out, and that will be your pass.
KELLEY LAND & CATTLE CO (Hugo-Marine on St Croix). As usual, passes will be sold by Kelley Land & Cattle Co. We will hold a group night near the end of April for selling passes. There may also be some availability of birds by then. More details will be released as we get closer to that timeframe.
WOUNDED WARRIOR HUNT-The Washington County Chapter of Pheasants Forever is holding this hunt on April 2nd, and needs volunteers, including dog/handler teams. Minnesota Chapter members have helped with this in the past. Full info here.
Pete Aplikowski-President