A pack of all trades

Putting together and running a cohesive team of dogs requires a genuine understanding of each breed’s role in the field

- Eleanor Doughty

STICK IN hand, laden with game and surrounded by dogs come rain or shine, Sarah Langford is a familiar sight on the North York Moors from August to February. Langford and her partner live on a farm near Harrogate where they raise sheep, corral their toddler and work picking-up teams six days a week during the shooting season. But hers is not just any old gundog pack: as well as cockers, springers and German wirehaired pointers, Langford’s family of up to 20 dogs includes a standard poodle, a Brittany and a gaggle of Nova Scotia duck-tolling retrievers – or tollers. They’re an unusual sight en masse. Indeed, Langford may be the only person regularly working tollers on game in her main team. And her dogs do it all: they pick grouse, they sweep and, if asked, they herd sheep.

Langford first went picking up with her father and his labradors when she was four years old, and quickly got a taste for it. Beginning work as a dairy nutritionist, she realised how much she missed dogs so began her own team with a rescue cocker, from there building a practice picking up with and producing a variety of breeds. After her first cocker litter she got a toller. “I’d been fascinated by them, and you don’t see them out in the shooting field,” she says. “I wanted a dog that I could show as well.”

The tollers have lived up to the myth and legend but they are not easy dogs. “You don’t see many working for a reason,” she believes. “If a toller doesn’t want to do something, then a toller will not do it.” Langford’s work as back-up dogs, picking the birds that others have missed. Her old girl Reeva can often be seen on the grouse moor air-scenting: “People think that she’s in her own little world but she’s looking for birds. Nothing fazes her at all.”