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Fancy a pigeon?
Britain has forty four thousand pigeon fanciers and rather surprisingly for such a seemingly northern based hobby, three and a half thousand of them can be found in the south east. They race and show their pigeons in shows very similiar to Crufts for dogs. Miranda Sawyer visits one of the top pigeon lofts in the country in Claygate in Surrey.
Keith Mott has been keeping racing pigeons since he was a lad in the 1950s and is now one of pigeons most experienced pigeon fanciers.
"Me and my brother got our first pair of pigeons from a school friend's older brother, and in them days I worked down Kingston market, I used to come home and knock up pigeon lofts up out of old orange boxes and things, we nicked me dads old tool shed and converted it into our first loft and thats how we got started."
As well as racing and breeding pigeons Keith now writes as a pigeon journalist for the British Homing World, takes portrait pictures of champion pigeons and makes videos of them, some of which provided exclusive shots of pigeons being liberated at the start of races from both Europe and the UK in this Inside Out film.
But pigeon fanciers are now facing major problems both to their racing and their shows. The latest outbreak of Bird flu at Bernard Matthews turkey farm has meant that DEFRA the government's vets have placed restrictions on them and at the moment they are unable to fly outside the united Kingdom and would be unable to hold their shows.
Luckily for Keith, and the other twenty thousand fanciers who attended with two thousand pigeons, their national show took place in the winter Gardens in Blackpool just before the latest outbreak. Keith was asked to judge one of the highest accolades paid to a pigeon fancier.
"The winter Gardens is like the royal Albert Hall in London, it's beautiful and massive. On the judging night it's calm just us and the pigeons but the next day it's heaving the floors the aisles the balconies all full of people", Keith Mott said.
He adds: "And the pigeon that I picked to win the class I was judging was owned by Norman Perry of Port Talbot, he's a top man at the moment it had a lovely classic head and that lovely dark eye, beautiful balance and the feather was soft it caught my eye straight away."
Pigeons are hardy birds and have faced even nastier things than bird flu in the past.....Nazis. In the second world war many pigeons were heroes. Every bomber carried a pair of homing pigeons so if the plane was shot down the pigeons would fly home with a message attached to them to let the base command know where the crew were so they might be rescued. Many were shot down and killed from enemy fire.
Peter Bryan General Manager Royal Pigeon Racing Assocition said: "Obviously mobile phones have replaced them now but homing pigeons saved countless lives during the second world war."
"As for the latest Bird flu outbreak we are hoping that there wont be any more outbreaks and we can get back to long distance racing from southern France and even Barcelona.
A top racing pigeon will fly back from southern France in a day and many of them are very valuable. The most expensive one was sold for a staggering one hundred and six thousand pounds. But never fear if you want to take up pigeon fancying most of them sell for about ten pounds", he adds
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