Thank you Karen. This was helpful. To answer your questions:
With the knowledge that you have of your truffle area, what time of the day would be best for you to search? Morning, as it is cooler and sometimes winds can pick up in the evenings. Mornings can be more damp, but truffle season here is a season of continuous rain, drizzle and fog. So avoiding high humidity or dampness will be pretty much impossible. So odor is going to be sticking to all the wet things around us as a standard norm.
What are different ways you can test which direction the wind is coming from? Using smoke matches, watching the leaves, grass, other vegetation. Even watching flags on flagpoles on the way to the site.
What are the advantages of knowing where the wind is coming from? So I can work my dog downwind.
Why would you set your dog to work upwind or downwind? Because if my dog is downwind, the scent is moving toward her. If she is upwind, then the scent is moving away from her and she wouldn’t pick it up until she moved around to the other side of the source, thus positioning herself downwind. In the last class series (level 2), I used this concept several times to set up exercises where I purposely placed the targets in locations where we could search downwind from them. This was for my other dog who needed confidence building.