Todays pigeons better or worse ?

[gangster]

does anyone think the over use of modern day products in some way hinders rather than promotes there well being........thus hidering there flying ability

[Chris Little]

find it hard to be able compare birds of a while ago and birds of today, wisnae racing a while ago, conditions birds hard to fly in thirty or forty years ago are nothing like conditions they fly in today, a lot more obstacles around in the present, a lot man made in to the bargain, nuclear power stations, telephone masts and whatever else we dont know about thats dotted around the country

 

Nuclear power stations, that's a new one but a load of crap  ;D ;D ;D

[Ronnie]

Vic i didnt take it you was slating beginners mate .

Just using myself as an example of putting bad birds through to emphasise the point that it does go on.

And beleive me allthough i put a few bad birds in the basket ive seen worse birds than mine being put through.

[mosslands1]

Well everyone just to confuse you even more my family of birds have been in my family for 70 years dad grandad then me and weve been breeding winners most years and no health problems ever .

[Guest Vic]

Moslands! well said,  keep it up. vic.

[Guest Silverwings]

valid points from tammy and vic regarding todays pigeons and how they cope with wires ,mobile phones etc and like vic says white coat flyers and sterile enviroments ? looking at it this way what birds we get left with at the end of the season earn their perch....ray

[Roland]

I also feel there maybe another equation that may have a bearing.

Pigeons love the sun on their backs, especially yearlings, and warmth brings Condition and form, even that super form. Now does global warming also have a bearing here. I'd believe, as me and a show judge discussed 3 weeks ago, that the birds in the 'Pen' were classes above what was enter 40 - 50 years ago. The wholeness of the pigeon has improve, I believe, nigh out of recognition. Which I feel also has a great bearing on the velocities achieved to - day.

[ch pied]

good point , ganster,  there are fancier's today who's bird's could not fly the length of my street, if their bird's were not supported by the pharmacutial crutch,over use of anti-bios & all the other stuff shoved down their neck's,

[Guest Silverwings]

interestin stuff roland ,the climate change also brings with it cooler and damp summers ? may favour pigeons of the future with the type of feathering that can handle the wet weather ? i feel the homing  pigeons  adaption to climate change would be over longer periods ,as opposed to the noticable changes in show breeds you have seen show pigeons are more like designer pigeons with qualities engineered in them to comply with certain judging standards....ray

[pigeonscout]

Could it be that we have changed the pigeon by breeding it to be faster be it for short or long distance the main aim has been to make them faster. The question is have we made the birds weaker in all other fields in our quest for speed. Take the grey hound as an example it is fast but good at very little else. Could it be that when the modern day pigeon makes a mistake it does not have what it takes to survive long enough to get home.

Is faster better? I do not know but faster is what we are looking for. Is it a case of bigger losses and faster birds or fewer losses and slower birds. How many birds in our lofts could survive in the wild?  You can see the birds that can survive in the wild on any city street but I don't think you would win many races with them.

[friendsloft]

Pigeonscout,I mention something on the same lines earlier on ,on this thread,just worded different, maybe we need to backtrack a little bit, letting the birds develope their own immunity, instead of pumping all these wonder cures in them and go faster tonics which  which are advertised in all the journals yes they might be doing some good short term,but what about the long term effects on are feathered friends do we really know????

friendsloft

[pj1001]

I feel that we have tried to breed faster more motivated pigeons at the expensive of endurance now. Then once we have got them we have adapted more modern feeding and racing mechanisms to try and make them go even faster. I feel now that alot of modern pigeons (and I am as much responsible in this as anyone else) are bred for a maximum of 10 to 12 hours continuous flying after that their homing abilities and abaility to orientate falls by the way side.

 

I am sure a lot of fanciers might disagree with this and they have every right to, but this is my opinion for what it is worth. I don't honestly think the birds of today are any faster than the older English and Irish strains because in 1965 the record velocity in Ireland for a 100 mile race was 2256ypm. It wasn't until a few years ago that this velocity was surpassed so if the olden days birds can do these typse of velocities then wheren't all slow either.

 

The immunity of our birds today is for sure a lot weaker tahn it was in the 60s'-70's., maybe partly due to teh fact that the birds then where kept in harsher conditions than today, with poorer grade feeding etc resulting in survival of the fittest. Now with modern medications a lot of the mediocre birds can survive in a race team longer, but I also think we need to look at the mass importing of continentaly birds also as part of the cause. Just because a bird has a Belgium of Dutch ring on it doesn't make it a world beater and there is a lot of crap being shipped out of these countries nowadays. In some cases birds that within their own countries their owners could hardly give away, but fanciers here and within the UK are filling lofts with them and breeding teams of pigeons from them. I am not saying that there aren't alot of good birds being imported also, but there are hell of a lot of birds which are scrap also.

 

PJ

[Chris Little]

On the topic of winning velocities

 

The SNFC Gold Cup record winning velocity is 1645 ypm from Rennes in 1967

[friendsloft]

on corn, freshwater and no man made wonderdrug, immune system intact,homing ability intact ,agood honest pigeon racing for the love of home. just my thoughts

friendsloft

[Roland]

Sorry Silver one ... it was  a 'Racing Pigeon Show'.

[Beanz]

Not that sure that the velocities are that much better some of the winds given at liberations these days leave a lot to be desired, results of birds up in Northerly winds doing 1500's not a chance, one of the old fanciers said the convoyers of some organisations need to be shown how to read a compass so they can get the correct wind.

[Guest]

I’m not sure if pigeons have got better or not but I think they have changed, there is more variety of type, more 'horses for courses' pigeons. There is no doubt fancier’s have improved by adopting new methods, but with such improvements come drawbacks.

My first experience goes back to the early seventies flying in to the South Wales Valleys, at that time, where I lived there was no one flying widowhood and the gene pool was very much ‘local’. The exchange of birds seemed to be on a local basis (within the valleys, though I know there were fanciers even then buying in from the continent). The aim of every loft was Thurso this was the blue riband race 490 to where I lived. If it was a decent day (I don’t mean easy) you would get a handful of birds home in the club on the day, if memory serves me right, the Welsh Combine when it reformed had about 10,000 birds at Thurso (?).  Lerwick was the next step up………. to me 595 mile at the top end of the Valley but you would only get 1000 birds there, it was a real graveyard but you did have some fanciers who were the tops at this distance, Morgan & Cook of Llanileth springs to mind also Bowen Bros down in Porthcawl and several more.

These birds were tough birds that were expected to fly through the program and win the sprints as well as the long ones. The strength of these birds was their homing ability. Feeding methods were very basic, the cheapest beans & peas that could be found were purchased and often chicken corn for the big races Red Band was bought. Canker was undoubtedly a scourge, if a bird went dodgy the method to try and cure was to roll a ball of bicarb in soot and pop it down the throat, if the bird didn’t recover it was disposed of. A small minority only carried on South Road racing in to south Wales…but there was also an East West Fed/national if I remember that flew Strasbourg and Luxembourg. As an aside this would be a fantastic route for a Combine, flying into to the SW, Wales & Ireland even. It would be a real tough route with the birds flying into mainly headwinds and it would be fantastic to get Devon & Cornwall flying together again.

I think what has happened in the last few decades is that this old type of pigeon into South Wales the likes of the Hansene have practically disappeared. In their place are pigeons of different types and origin, we now have birds that have been bred to fly very fast up to 200 mile;200 to 4/500 mile and over 500 mile, on the very rare occasion there are birds that will fly from 50 – 600 mile.

Those birds of 40 years ago could not compete against the sprint 200 milers at the sprints, so they are better today in my opinion at this distance, they could not compete either against the middle distance at 400 mile. Please accept that these are generalisations, I’m sure there will be some exceptions to this but they will be rare. Then we come to the crunch the 500-mile pigeon, well I think the 500 milers has improved in one way and that is they are faster pigeons today than they were but I do not believe they have the stamina or homing ability that the old pigeons had. So is the 500-mile pigeon better? I think it depends on the route you fly, because in all this I think that route is key to this question, I’ll come back to this. As to the 500/700-mile pigeon I think there is an absolute improvement, I have little experience here though because I know of very few fanciers who competed in to Wales in those days from San Sebastian/Barcelona/Perpignan etc.

Now I have flown to three completely different areas in England and Wales. The first was the North road into South Wales where my Fed would have 28,000 YB at its first race, the second was in Yorkshire where I flew with the Barnsley Fed, with about 5000 Young birds coming in to the area and the third now the WECA which has about 1300 coming into the area.

Experience suggests to me that you need a different type of pigeon depending on location; route and race program and I believe these now dictate the quality of pigeon we fly. I also think the new breed of pigeon scribe / press officer have made an impact on the type of pigeon.

In to South Wales you were nearly always flying in to a headwind on the North road, the prevailing wind was SW and this was reflected in the results, if you lived on the Eastern side of the valleys on the sprint races you were in a much better position, also if you lived down the bottom end of the valleys. The pigeons were therefore fairly hardy and the norm velocity I would think was about 1100/1200. The birds that would fly at 1500/1600 did not tend to get bred from, because there weren’t so many races won at that velocity. There were of course birds that could win from1000 to 1600 but like today they are elusive pigeons. But then by the mid nineties there had been a huge turn around in Wales, the majority had turned south or southeast. And there had been an influx of continental pigeons; I believe we were probably the last place in the UK to be affected by this invasion. These birds I believe are far more suited to this route because you needed birds that could take full advantage of the assistance they would get from the SW wind and of course the majority of Dutch, Belgian & German birds have flown South for over a century. Sadly the good homing birds that had been created over many decades on the North road started to disappear, because not only was the route changed but there was far more opportunity.

There was a dramatic change in the pigeon press in the seventies and early eighties, the Racing Pigeon was dominant, very few people took the BHW. But after the RPRA purchased it the BHW for reasons I won’t try to go in to became the No 1 paper by circulation. And with this new impetus the paper got bigger, there were far more ‘ordinary’ scribes and of course the new breed of semi professional scribe developed, such as Les Parkinson. What this meant was that publicity became available to people that had never been heard of before which was good but the downside was that new breeders/studs started to suddenly appear and the press was able to create demand and then point people in the direction of supply.

Perhaps that needs clarifying scribes started to get paid for doing press officer jobs not a pittance or expenses but decent money. They no longer just reported on the race winner as in the old days they started to provide opinions, they started publicising particular fanciers in their columns, publicising fanciers who had won from birds supplied by specific breeders and then start to publicise their own performances with the same breed, a conflict of interest maybe? And being human we all wanted the same designer breeds and am I not right in saying that if you own one of these star breeds it adds a couple of noughts on to the selling price. They also have become spin doctors, you now have scribes being paid to publicise one loft races, put out the spin on why transporters were bought, why secretaries were sacked saying how the organisation was not at fault………but an industrial tribunal said they were??

It was no coincidence when an article would appear on someone, in the same issue there’d be an advert selling his or her birds. Or perhaps one of the designer scribes would mention them in their column. The areas that had the best publicity I would suggest created the best pigeon market areas.

Then of course you had the super auctions that started to appear. Charlie Miller was the first I saw but I think the man that moved this on was Tony Cowan with Europa Auctions, today the most prolific must be Mark Evans and the Haswell Plough auctions. These have had a huge impact on the way we are going (and I’m not decrying these because they are providing a cracking service to us fanciers and I thought the 1st Black country show was a great day out and I hope to get to next years) but I do think the scribes and auctions have had in some instances an adverse effect on the quality of birds compared to years ago.

I mentioned three routes and to compete successfully I think you need the following type of bird;

North Road in to S Wales- a hardy bird that can win regularly from 900/1200 and has good homing instincts, a bird fairly easily turned south but not to successful on a fast day.

East coast route UNC/Yorkshire down (inland) – a fast pigeon able where possible to win from 60/300 mile at vel of 1200- 1600, but not such a good one for turning north.

East to west route into Devon & Cornwall (inland)- a pigeon that can win between 1000 and 1500 and is street wise.

In days gone by I don’t think there were such distinct types available as now and that is because we are an island and the import of pigeons from the continent was not common, the priority was to have birds that could win at 500 mile.

Due to avian flu restrictions many turned north in 2006 only to find that they had heavy losses, I think it is because of the type of pigeon being raced successfully on the south road. The east coast route tends to breed pigeons that are very fast up to 300 mile but they don’t quite need that homing ability (HA) required coming on the North road, their strength is speed, their weakness is homing ability. Now if you could harness the HA of the old birds with the speed of these current birds then you would be creating something special. I mentioned the third route where I live now. In terms of numbers fanciers are very wide spread and there ain’t a lot of us down here but in terms of location, this is the worst/most difficult I have flown to. Some may have read elsewhere about my aim in pigeons and consequently I have not been very successful (but I’m starting to rectify that!!) so my benchmark for the points I make are based on amount of birds left in the loft. In Wales I used to have the average amount left, the birds on a tough race  perhaps wouldn’t come until the next day but more often than not they would come. In Yorkshire, they used to come and losses weren’t very high, however there was a marked difference in my mind and that is if they didn’t come on the day then they didn’t seem to work back like they used to! The competition in Yorkshire, around Barnsley was intense and because of the type of pigeon being flown I would suggest the skill required of the fancier was actually greater than that required on the North road but the quality of bird was not, not when it got hard in the sprint races!

Down here in the SW the factors are different again, firstly you don’t have a large drag going into a small geographic area; you have a large geographic area with a small amount of birds, the winds tend to be stronger because they hit us first and slow down slightly as they go across country and we have a huge hawk problem, something that I did not experience in the East of England, sparrow hawk yes but he’s a sweetie compared to Percy!

I do believe that the best fanciers will win wherever they live but they have to adapt to the area and the type of pigeon needed. There are two fanciers I have met, who were top fanciers in Bucks/Beds area and another a top man in London and moved down here to the SW living between Tiverton and Barnstaple, they brought their birds down here with them, birds that had bred many multiple winners, what I call ‘designer’ birds from Belgium. They got wiped out pretty quick and failed with them, they have introduced new birds, birds from the locality or birds similar in type to those winning down here and the one is certainly back to winning ways and is top man again! The birds need to be streetwise they need to know how to survive Percy and the Sparrow hawk. I must admit when I moved here I’d complained like everyone else about hawks, we even had several percy pairs within 6 miles of us above Cefn Coed in the early 80’s but they didn’t do damage not like the destruction I’ve seen down here. In April this year I lost over 20 around my loft to Percy, I wasn’t worried about the Sparrow hawk, if the birds weren’t quick enough to take off then they didn’t have the genes I wanted to reproduce and I think I only during 2006 lost the odd one to him. But the Sparrow hawk what a different matter. How did I deal with him well Ivo mec helped but that only helped locally it did not help when my birds were roaming or training or racing!! I followed the advice of my new pigeon partner, leave them out let them get used to strikes and learn how to avoid them by going low Percy will pull out ‘cause he knows its dangerous, you’ll lose good birds but no point in breeding the same again because if they aren’t streetwise they’ll get taken. So again down to ‘type’ birds that could win 20 x 1sts in one area are useless in another. We turned birds north at the start of the year that had flown 380 mile and we lost them at Cheltenham!! I think this is something people should consider when they buy birds. I think a good tip for anyone wanting to buy, is if you can buy from a fancier that is a top guy and flies 20 miles further than you. That way you know you are not only buying top bloodlines from a top fancier but you are also buying birds that are the right ‘type’ for your area.

So are today’s birds better or worse? Maybe, maybe not; in some areas undoubtedly better in my mind, in others not so.  I expect I’ve muddied the waters further. I am in work and there’s very little going on so between working, I’ve been writing this. When I start writing I never know what’s going to come out, it tends to develop as I write, so I apologise if its disjointed and you think it’s a load of tosh. I ain’t got a problem with that cause its just me rambling and hopefully it provides some food for thought, if you think its s**t I’m happy for you to say so, no offence taken.

Happy New Year

Alan

[schouwman71]

pigeons these days are being bred for speed,thus developing wedge shaped pigeons rarther than the long cast birds from years ago,and even these are now capable of winning distance races,you only have to read the results in the B.H.W pigeons are definatly changing by a lot of inbreeding,but on another level were taking a lot of good points away from them by doing this.British fanciers tend to buy a breed in and we then inbreed with them and in a few years they go down the pan,but the belguims dont they are always looking for a good pigeon no matter what breed it is,its us english who run them to the ground with our pure this and pure that,plus i think were loosing the stamina and homing instinct in todays pigeons.Just my views.

[Guest Paulo]

some of the best pigeons are mongrols crosses strengthen any animal its a proven fact look at Busschaerts.

[pigeonscout]

Albear

You say leave them out let them get used to strikes and learn how to avoid them by going low Percy will pull out ‘cause he knows its dangerous, you’ll lose good birds but no point in breeding the same again because if they aren’t streetwise they’ll get taken.

My advice is get you birds into the loft don't let them hang about your garden when not flying.

If you leave them out in the hope they will learn to not get taken by hawks you will end up with a garden full of feathers. My advice is if you like you bird to be in the garden build yourself a small 3ft x 3ft cage made from piano wire. That way you can view the bird you put in it without obstructing your view. That's why london zoo use it so you can see the birds more clear. It is not your fault if a silly hawk hits it at 70MPH when attacking the bird you have in it. It is not a trap its just a cage?

[Guest]

Pigeonscout, I kept them in and kept losing them, I let them out and stopped, by the time of my last training toss I'd  had half a dozen strikes just from training at different spots birds coming back split up and injured, however I started racing with 27 and finished with 22. I noticed on every race my birds coming low across the fields and they weren't all headwinds!!..............the other thing is peregrines don't  take static, they take in flight, the sparrow hawk will take static, but Ivo Mec knocked percy over I think around the loft, cause I lost 2 the first day after treating, didn't lose any again around the loft.

Regards

Alan

[barlbylofts]

i agree with ronnie. like i said i have been tought the old ways like he said in his reply about the lofts and thats what i have stuck with.maybe im behind times when it come to the loft designs but my birds do well for me and i will stick with it lol. wow what a good thread thia one. well thats what i love about this wonderfull sport of ours we all have different ideas and its great to read what other people think nice one silverwings

 

mark

barlbylofts

[pigeonscout]

Albear

You are right about peregrines the only defence is to fly low. I was talking about hawks hitting the birds in the garden.

[Roland]

You know, when that ole little feral pops into your loft, too many discard it litterually or what a blessing it can be. Feed light and entice it to stay. Even train it for up to 60 miles your birds won't live with it - But above all keep it around - cleansed with water and puratives on feed, for it will spot Hawks way before any of yours will, and lead them to safety.

[pigeonscout]

Albear

A dosage of 2 to 3 mg/kg ivermectin is recommended as a safe and effective antiparasitic drug for falcons and it has been used successfully to treat infestations of Serratospiculum species.

Is this the same suff you say knocks them over.