Trailblazer That time came in 2015 after he’d finished graduate school and secured a teaching position at a private school. Remembering how it had inspired him, Durrell tore out the original Georgia-Florida Shooting Dog Handlers Club article and pasted it into a Moleskin notebook he called the Gun Dog Notebook. In it he’d write down anything and everything he learned about hunting and gun-dog training from articles, books, his own experience and, most important, veterans of the sport. “The point was for me to document everything I was doing training my first hunting dog so I’d know what I was doing the next go-around,” he says. Durrell Smith, a visual arts teacher in Atlanta and a Georgia native, remembers the surprise he felt on reading an article about the club, which is commonly referred to as the Black Dog Handlers Association, three years ago. “I thought, ‘Huh, those guys look like me,’” he says, laughing. “And they looked really cool.” Durrell, 29, had just acquired and begun training a Labrador, named Ruger, for hunting. The pair had one season under their belts when he came across the article. Durrell decided he wanted to be like the veteran hunters he read about; but he wasn’t proficient in hunting or dog handling. He grew up hunting squirrel with his grandfather, and he had some experience training dogs, but he had worked primarily with pit bulls, not specially bred sporting dogs, which require more intense and intricate training. Nonetheless, Durrell was intrigued by his more experienced friends’ stories of hunting with their families and decided that once his teaching career took off, he’d turn his attention to the sport. With his wife’s encouragement, in 2017 Durrell began a podcast to augment his notebook—a platform for collecting and orally documenting information on hunting and training bird dogs. “At the time, I didn’t know anything about podcasts,” he recalls. “I just got on my phone and hit the voice memo recorder and started talking.” Over the past two years, Durrell has recorded roughly 70 episodes of his podcast, which he called The Gun Dog Notebook Podcast because it served a purpose similar to that of the pages he was filling: to document the sport. The podcast quickly gained momentum. Durrell realized that bird-dog handlers, many of whom now participate in the podcast, were an exceptionally welcoming bunch. “As long as you’re willing to learn from people who know more than you, you’re good,” he says. “I was basically putting myself on an accelerated learning curve and I didn’t even realize it.” Durrell wants to use the podcast as a platform for exploring the often-untold history of trainers and handlers in the South. “I want to start doing more live podcasts on a video platform—get more into bird-dog history and what I call the truth about bird dogs.” 12
“As long as you’re willing to learn from people who know more than you, you’re good. I was basically putting myself on an accelerated learning curve and I didn’t even realize it.” <strong>13</strong>
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