North Star Hunting Beagles

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Welcome to Our North Star Hunting Beagles Website

Brenda and I have established this website to promote the hunting beagle, share our thoughts on different topics, share information about our beagles, and share our experiences on places we have been and people we met along the way.  Hopefully this will be helpful and informational. North Star Hunting Beagles History

I am a rabbit hunter from Wisconsin and did not come from a family of rabbit hunters.  I was introduced to rabbit hunting by a high school friend (Jake), and his beagle Dolly.  Jake, Dolly, and I went rabbit hunting a few times and I really enjoyed it.  Dolly was a grade dog that could find a rabbit and bring it around to the gun.  I liked it enough that I decided to buy my own beagle; at 17 years of age I did not have a lot of knowledge about hounds or people and this resulted in a predictable and not very successful start. The first beagle that I purchased in 1975 for $25 was registered, could find and run a rabbit, but was gun shy as I found out during our first hunt together.  Now, Meatloaf sings that two out of three ain’t bad, but I will tell you that this was the wrong two out of three because you can not shoot rabbits with a gun shy dog.  So… the valuable lesson here was that you can not trust everyone and buyer beware in any transaction.  These were both good lessons and are still useful today 46 years later.  All things generally improve with experience, knowledge, and time and that held true with my rabbit hunting experience as well.  I eventually met two people who became very key to my future; one was my wife Brenda, who loves dogs and is very understanding, and the other was Jim Huss.  Jim had many, many years of rabbit hunting experience; his dad hunted rabbits before him and he knew a good beagle when he saw it run.  Jim taught me a lot about what a beagle should and should not do and also introduced me to hare hunting in Northern Wisconsin.  We rabbit hunted and ran dogs together, went on trips and bought dogs together, we bred to each others dogs and even went to some beagle trials together.  I owe Jim for the experience and knowledge he shared with Brenda and I; we had a lot of fun and some real interesting experiences.  
Brenda and started using the kennel name of North Star about the mid-1980s.  We did trial some during the early phases of the Gun Dog movement but gradually stopped trialing.  The dogs required to be successful at trialing did not have the same traits as the dogs we wanted to breed for hunting so we could only be successful at one or the other.  We chose hunting and breeding the beagles for hunting.  If they did well in an occasional trial, great, but we were not going to breed beagles to please trialing judges.  Pleasing trialing judges is a moving target and the traits that judges reward are not, is some cases, the traits that make a good hunting beagle.  We have stayed with AKC register beagles and have bred to some field champions if we believe that they can help improve the bloodline.   Brenda and I continue to seek out different strains of beagles that we feel will mesh well with the breading that we have and improve the hunting experience.  We have met many great people in our travels and improved our bloodline in the process.  One thing to keep in mind is that not every rabbit hunter has the same idea about what a good hunting dog should and should not do.  It takes a significant amount of research and discussions with a kennel owner before committing to take a trip to see a strain of beagles.  Even with all of the up front research we do not always find what we are looking for when we visit a kennel.  We do always learn something though and that is valuable as well so that we do not make the same error again.  
My career has taken us to different parts of the U.S. and this has been helpful sometimes personally as well.  Our home base is Sobieski, Wisconsin (a little North and West of Green Bay).  We were in New York state for about two years, Pennsylvania for about 18 months and then in lower Michigan for 12 months.  There were several bloodlines we wanted to get more familiar with and that was one of the motivations in taking the temporary assignment in Pennsylvania.  We have had a chance to visit a few kennels and have found a dog or two that we believe will help our bloodline in the future.  Brenda and I are back home in Wisconsin where we plan to stay.  I retired last year (2015) so no more vagabond lifestyle.  We did pick up some new blood lines while living in Pennsylvania and Michigan. 

How to Move Around in this Website

Please use the tabs at the top of each page of the website to move around to the various pages provided.  I wanted to make this as easy as possible because I have been to many websites that were very difficult to navigate around in.  I have set up a page in the website for each of our dogs with a picture, pedigree, and short description of each dog.