Picking up a 6 month old Lab/ Cattle / Pointer mix next week. Very calm and ovedient. can already sit lay and stay on command. Give me the basic rundown on how to train her to bird hunt. My goal is to get her to sit next to me and retrieve when i down a bird. Mostly dove hunting but the possibility to hunt duck and quail. Flushing or pointing is not a big concern for me. My biggest goal is for her to sit next to me and retreive downed birds. What supplies do i need to use and how should i train her. Really only have the backyard for most training and possibly some larger areas.

First break and familiarize her to gun fire! Start with something not very loud while she is distracted wanting to do something she likes to do....like retrieve
Familarize her with bird smell....you can buy scent to put own her favorite toy to retrieve.
If trained to sit already, you are halfway there! She shud have instincs to retrieve! I use my dawgs name as release to go get whatever is thrown or shot.
After getting her to retrieve, a whole new line of training ensues---whistles for STOP, COME and hand signals for left , right or further back. There are some very good books available to help you. Wolfers books come to mind. Good luck with your new friend!

www.gundogsupply.com has lots of retriever training material, you should be able to find something.

You can teach her to follow your gun by sitting on a bucket and pointing an axe handle or any similar stick.  Have someone stand behind you and when she looks down the line of the stick, toss a bumper out and let her retrieve it.  It is very important to introduce gunfire properly so as to avoid gunfire shyness.

I took my dogs out very early in the process and got them used to shot gun fire had them in my tahoe and took them to the range and stayed with them while my buddys shot trap windows up and stayed back and just talked to them and played with them opened a window and kept talking to them pretty soon I moved up the process went rather quick and they never had a problem with shooting around them then we took them out and let them hear the shot and let the dummy fly pretty soon they had it down next we moved to dead birds as the dummy and then they really took off. This was my way to work them in to it. worked for my pups now this is all they want to do my big male will even take my gun to the truck for me empty and in it's soft case. He will grab it by the end and pull it to the truck it's all he wants to do is hunt. Good luck hope this helps

If concerned about breaking her in to gun fire, what I did for my bird dogs is have someone play with the dog about 100 yards away behind with the dogs toy's. I start small with a .22 and move up to a shotgun usually in a hour or so. I start small cause you only got one chance to do it right. But I start shooting away from the dog and have the person helping me move in with the dog closer and closer untill they are next to me. I then restart everything again with a 223. Usually they stop playing the first shot or two to see what the noise is, but after that I move in with the shotgun. Ive never had a problem. Usually in a hour I have the dog sitting next to me with a shotgun with no problems within a hour. If you start the see the dog cower or flinch, stop there and slower repeat everything another day.

For retrieving birds, I usually just get them in the habit of playing fetch using commands to go get it, and bring it here. As they do this they hear the words and associcate it with the actions. I have used feathers or frozen birgs from previous hunts. One problem I know people have is there either to hard mouthed or dont bring it all the way back and drop it a few feet from you. I fix this by backing up when there bringing it to me. They start getting closer I then take a step forward, place my hand on the bird and give the release command. Usually this is a quick fix for that problem. But if there hard mouthing the bird, get a rubber toy with the bumps on it from cabelas or something of sort. This teachs them to use less force to hold the bird. Also make sure the kids or no one else is playing tug a war as this will ruin all your work on being soft mouth.

But Gun dog books are out there and have alot of quick fixs.

Hope something was helpfull for you.