Roland

Farrell and Ford have come through Rugby together at all levels. Though it is always said you can't play them together etc. We did against France in the 2003 W.C. with Wilkinson and his mate - name escapes me unless I look it up. But Ford DIDN'T kick well against Fiji, so maybe that was why Farrell got preference ... then put them both on later Did arrogance cost England - as many try to make the case - in not taking the last penalty kicking into the 22.... I thick, personally that Wales and Scotland would have done the same ... GO FOR THE WIN at all costs! Comes off great, doesn't... well makes a lot happy lol

Walter, why the ' ... England in danger of leaving early.?! - Mind in the hardest grouping, it is still between three countries! - Surely it is time for the Scots, Welsh and co to hide their misbegotten uncalled for jealousies! The English ALWAYS cheer on ANY home country when they are out, or not involved ... Indeed would if ever a home country progressed further than the English.

A petition against petitions petitioning against petitions ... I petition or a petition petitioning against petitions portioning against petitions .. I petition.

Yep, a no go petition to both causes - Whatever they maybe - so neither will win lol

played a lot better, in the 2nd half, a good win, the yanks are next, for us, more of the same, :scotland: Lets hope so. A feel though that Scotland lack weight and as such have to used spend and quickness of release.

True Gulkie, very true. Was the reason why farm feeds lost a lot of their' popularity. Rats / Mice washing down the produce. I stood at a barns entrance once, many years ago now, when the farmer told me to put me trouser tucked into my socks ... The field opposite was like a waves of water. Rats galore then came over the road and into his barns. We have all seen the corrugated pig stalls... Has any one else seen the 'Ratting'? Tractors and umpteen dogs and guns.... Now I use farm corn a lot, and in confidence. Bagged as reaped and stored.

never had it. But then I put garden lime in the drinkers 2 -3 times a week. Has a calm and soothing effect. No I.B. E.coli is not ever a problem as nothing wet or damp stays in the lofty for 24 hours.

Peanut butter yes ... used once. Till a game / rodent catcher explained to me that it's scent carrys far... hence why effect, BUT also attracts. JMO.

You know IB, I have air bricks placed together (doubled so only one actual placing for strength) one in each compartment. Very small holes. Mate said to me 'They will pass through them no sweat'. I believe him. Incredible how small a hole the go through.

Agree baiting a trap with very many baits ... Even nothing works. Or smear a flavour. How ever how many traps does one need to put down? I used to have between 6 and 15 even down. Many months caught nowt, thought I was clear. Did a load before and during time the time my loft was soon to be down, I built a brink one with concrete flooring. Was amazed how many were still under the loft / shed etc. So the concrete floor has glass within throughout. Have a trench around the outside on the loft and garden FULL of broken glass! - Lofts on stilts, bricks etc. should be covered in glass, as should also under the floor. Ratty and mice can't gnaw through glass. Am I clear of mice? I very much doubt it, and know it's a constant fight. Mice droppings in the loft are so detrimental it's unreal. Even if not eaten. Many neighbours have cats. they are always around the outside of my garden of course. Nary a one in though as the loft and fences have a electric fence on top. ... When rebuilding the garden quickly got fouled up by the pesky things. Cats? Aren't like they used to be and doing ... No need as all are nigh over fed. By the way 'Cats having a license to roam' is utter myth and stupid. They have no more rights than you or I! Indeed owners can be sued if they harm or kill your' birds - rabbits etc. Just proving who's cat it is could be a problem though.

Yep. If any one, regardless who at what part of town think that they are mice, or rat, free then they are kidding themselves. I heard of a safe, and inexpensive way, to control mice and it works. Ray Naklicki read, and tried, this experiment. Mix 1 equal part flour with 1 equal part sugar with 1 equal part baking soda. Place in container around loft. Mice will devour the mixture. Once the mice drink water the baking soda foams up they bloat up and die. Ray says he hasn't seen any mice in weeks. I also have clear floor spaces which I loosely cover with the mixture. Foot prints show up....

If the first wouldn't get removed / moved then I wouldn't of course, put others up. But we have 2 /3/4 games a day at the present time. Wales today now ... Scotland soon. Think you could try a little harder actually. Me and a few - like Owen enjoy other things to debate, like rugby and other sports.

Yep paddymac all my posts get removed forthwith. Rather silly ... indeed stupid really one would say. Mind will ask the boss why... If allowed to reach him lol.

Just another little bit of nonsense for you to delete and keep happy lol. Since you have nothing better to do.

Was removed. So just another little bit of nonsense for you to delete and keep happy lol.

Well what an exciting game the Springboks V Japan was. Of course most thought it would be an easy victory for the Springboks ... and most viewers were soon routing for the 'Under Dog. There we are Andy, another post for you to take of... Thought as you wanted, need something to do I'd keep you happy.

Won well, as did Ireland.

No surprise in how awkward the game would be. Fiji have been improving in leaps and bounds, as their' performances of late have shown. England had a rough patch for sure in both half's. Ireland should win comfortably today, but Canada will be rough, tough and hard... but lack the finesse. As for Wales Owen... Well at least they won't lose today lol

Feel then John that at last we may have a pigeon to shine aside the bussearts. They win / have won at all distances and weathers alike. Indeed any new comer to the sport, with a few bob to spare, wouldn't go amiss with the Frans Zwols then. Have a proven record here in the UK already ... which is a mite different than on the continent, for many so called 'Names' fail miserably when put on the road here.

'Finally turned up at 5 past 8 not good enough,a phone call to say the we're delayed was all that was needed'. SAY rEBUS. Personally I think you want some thing to do MATE. Drivers can't keep stopping to answer phones. Would only say the same again ... and again ... and again!. Mind I guess they could telephone all the road agencies in advance and get a clear hassle free drive straight to yous. Besides any inconsiderate fanciers not having birds ready, or phone to say 'Be there in a mo' ... 35 minutes later etc. etc. Rebus, on reflections don't you feel rather daft for posting as such? Do you, or should you, ask yourself if it is pangs of self importance and the world should know it revolves around you. I believe we should be glad these guys - agreed to earn a living - put themselves out trying to do you, and many others in the game a service!!! Or would you be happier to go back to the days just after Amtrax packed up catering for the fancy for the very reasons you have just posted and moaned about! Like many other fanciers you take some believing, whinge, whine ME, ME ME!

Most / Many seeds, beans and peas for that matter, already have oil in their properties. Linseed / Flax though is good for cleansing the system as a laxative. Good when returning from a race as it cleanses and has a high protein. Small seeds are good conditions - Canaries etc. Me I also like a decent mix. 50% or a little more of Tic beans 25% protein / maples 22% protein. I also feed the larger beans / peas first, then the small seeds as they will finish the small seeds of first and then maybe add some larger stuff ... depends on the amount given of course. I add Maize and Hemp in colder weather as these warm the blood. JMO Very good advice Tony in saying 'A couple of things. Make sure is cold pressed Linseed Oil and don't mix it into the whole bag as it may go rancid over time'.

Interesting reading Postby Jeff » Fri Aug 21, 2015 1:35 pm (Alberta Classic) The Case of the Disappearing Homing Pigeons By Rebecca J. Rosen Between 1968 and 1987, about 900 homing pigeons released at the Jersey Hill fire tower in upstate New York got lost, never to be seen again. Why couldn't they find their way home? Between 1968 and 1987, Cornell professor William T. Keeton and his colleagues released thousands of homing pigeons from different points in upstate New York and then tracked them to see if they could find their way home. Homing pigeons are famously good navigators, and, for the most part, the pigeons set sail in the right direction. But there was one route that caused them trouble: A 74-mile stretch from the Jersey Hill fire tower back to their loft at Cornell. Only 10 percent of the pigeons trying to make that journey ever made it home. The rest -- about 900 pigeons -- disappeared completely. Except, that is, on August 13, 1969. On that date, the pigeons released at Jersey Hill flew right back to Ithaca with no problems. Down on the ground, Keeton and his team took meticulous notes about the weather and whatever else they could notice. Nothing seemed different from any other day. They were mystified. "When Bill Keeton was first setting up his pigeon loft at Cornell, he got birds from local pigeon racers," Jonathan T. Hagstrum, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey told me. "They told him: Don't go to Jersey Hill. You'll lose your birds." There was something going on at Jersey Hill, but what? And why was August 13, 1969, so special? * * * Bird navigation is not well understood, and the hypothesized cues that birds use to make their "maps" (or how they point in the right direction homeward) are many: gradients in inclination and intensity of the geomagnetic field, visual landmarks, or even atmospheric odors. Keeton and his colleagues hoped that somewhere in that patch of upstate New York they'd be able to find something that was sending these pigeons astray. Whatever it was, it was likely a key component of pigeon GPS. One possible clue: laboratory tests conducted in the '70s found that homing pigeons can detect what are known as "infrasounds" -- sounds at a frequency below the range of human perception. Humans, roughly speaking, can't hear sounds lower than 20 Hz, give or take a little for the sounds' intensity and the differing abilities of humans. (You can listen to a 20 Hz tone here.) Pigeons, it was found, could detect sounds at least as low as 0.05 Hz. The world is downright awash in infrasounds. They can come from anything: explosions, earthquakes, storms. But the infrasounds that may guide birds come from one place: the ocean. The Atlantic Ocean, whose coastline is some 200 miles from Ithaca, New York, is banging against the floor of the deep sea, and that energy travels through the continent. "The East Coast is going up and down about four microns every six seconds," Hagstrum told me. The pulsing land acts like the cone of a stereo speaker, creating a pressure wave -- infrasound -- that birds would be able to hear. Additionally, another type of infrasound waves travel from the ocean through the atmosphere, not the land, and scatter when they hit mountains, buildings, and other vertical features of the terrain. (Unlike the sounds humans hear, infrasounds can travel thousands of miles in the atmosphere. For example, a tone at 1000 Hz is 90 percent absorbed over a distance of seven kilometers at sea level. At 1 Hz, it takes 3,000 km to absorb 90 percent. For a tone at 0.01 Hz, "the distance exceeds the circumference of Earth," according to Hagstrum.) An infrasound laboratory at the University of Hawaii captures examples of these infrasounds and then re-renders them into the range of human perception (20 Hz to 20 kHz) through methods such as pitch shifting and compression. Here, to give you a sense of this invisible-to-us sonic landscape, is one of their "infrasound" clips, this one of the surf on Moorea, an island in French Polynesia. Could these mysterious infrasounds -- emanating from the oceans -- be the signposts that guide birds around the wide Earth? And, if so, why were the pigeons at Jersey Hill unable to hear them? * * * Following Keeton's death in 1980, the database containing the results of his pigeon releases was made available to all researchers upon request. Hagstrum took that data, and added some more: weather and topography. "The things that really influence sound are temperature, wind speed, and wind direction," Hagstrum said. He continued, "Those three things and then: the terrain." Using a software program called HARPA (Hamiltonian Acoustic Ray-tracing Program for the Atmosphere), Hagstrum was able to model the infrasound landscape for Jersey Hill, taking into account the topography of the place and the particular atmospheric conditions at the times of the releases. (For the weather data, Hagstrum used a NOAA database of twice-daily wind measurements.) "So you can create this virtual model of the atmosphere and the terrain on the day the birds were released," he explained. Hagstrum looked at the infrasound waves as they would travel from the Cornell loft to Jersey Hill and he found something very strange: Infrasound waves coming from Ithaca and heading westward skipped right over Jersey Hill, as he reports in his paperin the most recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology. Infrasounds from other locations reach Jersey Hill, but the sounds that carried the specific mark of the Ithaca loft -- the ones that announced "Home: This way!" to the pigeons -- they were absent. For the birds of the Cornell loft, Jersey Hill was in an acoustic "shadow zone." Acoustic shadow zones -- also known as "zones of silence" -- are a normal phenomenon: Sound waves bend up through the troposphere (the lower 10 km of the atmosphere), reach the stratosphere where the temperature gradient changes, and are bent back down. The space in between where the rays go up and where they come back down is mostly silent. This is why in big explosions, such as the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, people closer in often don't hear anything, while those further out do. Released in a shadow zone, the Cornell pigeons were lost. But why, then, on August 13, 1969, were they able to navigate so well? When Hagstrum modeled the atmospheric conditions from that date, he found an anomaly: Something -- a wind shear or a temperature inversion at about a kilometer's height -- bent the sounds back down. "It bent it down early enough that it hit at Jersey Hill," Hagstrum said. No one on the ground would have ever noticed anything odd weather-wise. It was a perfectly sunny day. Keeton and his colleagues took careful weather notes -- all for naught: The weather on the ground was more or less irrelevant. "This was going on a kilometer above their heads," Hagstrum elaborated. "They would have been sitting there completely oblivious." By Hagstrum's calculations, this sort of condition would have happened about 5 percent of the time -- infrequently enough that Keeton would have seen its effects just once. A shadow zone (combined with these atmospheric fluctuations) solves the mystery of Jersey Hill -- and the bigger mystery of pigeon navigation -- quite neatly. Unlike the other possible mapping cues, such as the geomagnetic field, acoustic conditions withing the atmosphere can change quite rapidly, explaining why pigeons can navigate from point A to point B just fine one day, and fail completely the next. To a human (or, at least, to this human), it seems impossible that pigeons can discern the right direction out of the waves of sound that pulse around the world. But, as Hagstrum sees it, a pigeon's ability to find the right infrasound signature is not all that different from our ability to spot our own homes by sight. "How do you walk into your house and not somebody else's house?" he said. "I mean, houses, especially in some housing tracts, all look the same, basically." But somehow, just like pigeons, we manage -- navigating homeward by the signs we're equipped to perceive.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/06/pigeon-fanciers-rspb-killer-hawks Sparrow Hawks still in decline lol. A comedies of falsehoods eh!

Can only echo the best replies here. A very good, well thought out, and professional job done lads. Never mind well done ... Very well done.

Maybe Novice, getting back to basic and a system back where fewer were bred but those that are, are from proven birds. Biggest detrimental to be removed for starters is A. Incest breeding. B. breeding in sensible weather and allowing a more back to nature reality. Pigeons allowed rest periods and trained in sensible weather for starters, and racing to start second week in May etc, which would also allow for the proven better racing for youngsters. Especially September... ... Oh of course that will never happen.... because every one thinks that they would lose out on 'Stealing a march' on other members. Those that tickle ears to own advantage wouldn't allow it. Like wise the boys that make a bob or two with their concoctions sold along with the culls fanciers clamber to buy every year from 'Names' whose vested interests is for things to remain the same lol