Tribute to Bob Wilson of Strathmiglo by Keith Mott

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A TRIBUTE TO BOB WILSON OF STRATHMIGLO
 
I was very sad to receive a message from my good friend, Terry Turpie today informing me that the Scottish champion pigeon racer, Bob Wilson had passed away at the age of 93 on 24th January. About ten years ago I went on a weeklong tour of Scotland filming for my video series and had the great pleasure to visit his loft and meet this great pigeon racer. Bob was a lovely man and made us all very welcome! Bob lived in Strathmiglo, a village near to Auchtermuchty in Fife and he owned and ran ‘Strath Garage’, the busy village garage. Bob’s racing loft was sites behind the garage and his very successful stock birds team were housed in the attic above the garage.

Bob start up in pigeon racing in 1970 and was very successful with the Kirkpatrick bloodlines and after a short time out of the sport he restarted with some Belgium stock birds. He was only really interested in Federation racing up to 400 miles and has always raced his birds to the nest on the Natural system. One of his best performances in the early days was in 1979 when won the Fife Federation from Weymouth with 2.700 birds competing and lifted all pools. The pigeon was a four year old blue chequer cock which was set up especially for the race. Bob thought he had messed up when the cock took nine hours to come home from an 80 mile training toss on the Monday before the Weymouth race, but the game pigeon still came and won the very strong Federation the following Saturday. In recent years Bob had won it all in the Federation, but he got a his best thrill when he had the only four birds home on the day of liberation in the club from a very hard Sartilly (525 miles) race. On my visit to his wonderful loft, Bob showed me a handsome young blue cock and had flown all six young bird races that year to the nest box and had won: three firsts, two seconds and one fifth. On one race this game pigeon was feeding four youngsters in the nest box! Brilliant pigeon racing! Bob was a Natural racer and paired up his 20 pairs of racer on the full moon in February. He was always looking to improve his racing team and brought in the odd birds every now and then to try out and beat his own racers. In recent years the Blue Van Bruans were very successful for the Wilson loft. Bob’s 50 young birds raced the full programme up to 300 miles and were always paired up and raced to eggs and youngsters. Bob was a lovely man and when he passed away, Scotland lost one of its great racing pigeon champions! Our sincere condolences to the Wilson family and Bob’s many friends. Bob Wilson RIP.

KEITH MOTT (26th JANUARY 2026