>>624087Not him, but my family always trained labs for both waterfowl and upland bird hunting.
Up until our dog was about 1 or 2 about once a week we'd take her in the yard and throw a retrieving dummy for her. On its own the dummy is ok, but we always wired pheasant wings to the dummies to get the dog used to the smell.
You should do exercises hiding the dummy or throwing it in dense brush, wait a minute or so, get the dog to look away so they lose track of where the dummy is, then let them try and find it. This is a good exercise for working on communication, you can train your dog to follow hand signals, verbal, or whistles.
For waterfowl we always threw a dummy off the dock at our cabin and made sure to make a very loud noise while the dummy was in the air to simulate gunfire and help the dog associate that noise positively with retrieving. Also if you have a boat you should go to marshes, different depths of water, etc to help your dog get used to different types of swimming and retrieving.
After that the most important thing you can do is get the dog out hunting and retrieving as many birds as possible when they're 1 and 2. Group hunting will help your bird retrieve more.
And that's about it.
>pic related, Rosie Lou 