Nice to read

Roland · November 1, 2006

Our Connie is a worker flat out for the sport

Good Pigeon News.

Pigeon racing is coo-l

A partnership of bird, human

By Denis Cuff

Knight Ridder/Tribune news

Published June 7, 2006

Chicago Tribune, United States - 26 minutes ago

CONCORD, Calif. -- Ron Actis paced his back yard and scanned the skies above Kirker Pass for his pigeons racing home from Nevada.

It was a 180-mile, four-hour-plus romp for the birds.

It was an exhilarating and torturous wait for their owner, breeder and trainer.

"I never eat breakfast on race day. I'm too on edge," said Actis, who has raced pigeons as a hobby for nearly 50 years. "Every week on racing day, it's like the first time for me. I get so excited when I see that first bird coming in and tucking for the landing."

While millions of other Americans watched horses race around an oval track in the Kentucky Derby that day, Actis and some 200 other Bay Area residents entered their thoroughbreds of the skies in races unlike any in sports.

The competitors, trucked to a central starting point, set their own courses to their own finish line.

Each bird flies to the home coop, getting its bearings from the sun, the earth's magnetism and low-frequency sounds.

Winners are judged by calculating speeds, not times, over their respective courses.

Athletic birds

The unusual format helps explain the low profile and widely misunderstood nature of pigeon racing, a sport built around a bond between dedicated people and athletic birds.

Homing pigeons can fly from 40 m.p.h. to 60 m.p.h. in races that cover 100 miles to 1,000 miles over territory they sometimes have barely or never seen.

The feat is the equivalent of a human running 100 miles in a day without a map.

In wars, homing pigeons have delivered messages saving thousands of soldiers' lives. Roman armies used them. A pigeon called GI Joe saved 1,000 British soldiers out of radio contact in 1943 by delivering a message to call off a bombing attack that would have blown them to bits.

In peace, the birds keep coming home to roost and race.

"These are not common wild pigeons that you see pooping at BART stations," said Actis, 64, a retired plumber. "These are domesticated, pure-bred athletes that are trained, fed and cared for by humans to bring out their homing instincts."

In the human part of this people-animal partnership, the shrinking ranks of pigeon fanciers breed and care for birds from chick to champion.

Many rise at 4 a.m. to sweep cages, give medicines or prepare birds for workouts. Some stay up late at night for lost birds to return.

Most racers are middle-age or older men who compete and socialize in a sport that some jokingly call poor man's horse racing.

"We are a dying breed," said Don McKinney of Danville, Calif., who took up the hobby in 1961.

McKinney is a member of the 79-year-old Martinez Homing Pigeon Club. His son has taken up the sport.

High costs deter newcomers. Racers can pay from $100 per bird to tens of thousands of dollars per bird. Pigeon lofts, where the birds live when not racing, can cost thousands of dollars to build too.

It's time-consuming

The time commitment of regular cleaning, caring and exercising birds also can deter people.

Newcomers typically face a long period of losing to experienced racers who have mastered the intricacies of breeding and training.

Nonetheless, McKinney said the low profile of his sport doesn't dilute his passion for breeding and hatching to racing his birds.

"You can be Al Davis in your own back yard," McKinney said of his sport. "There is no [former footfall commissioner] Pete Rozelle to tell you what to do."

To get birds with talent, owners need to learn about breeding.

But proper training can hone those skills, fanciers say.

Both breeding and training are high on Actis' priority at his loft, a network of neatly painted white and blue rooms that might be mistaken from the outside as housing for humans.

"That's Lady Janssen over there," Actis said of his prize breeder imported from Europe. "It was raised by the Janssen brothers of Belgium, probably the most famous pigeon people in the world."

Pigeon racing began in Belgium in the 1800s and is a major sport there.

Actis wouldn't divulge the price of Lady Janssen, but some pigeon fanciers say they have paid thousands of dollars for a top breeder.

Lady's Janssen's babies will race for the first time later this year.

Actis and other trainers gradually fly their young birds increasingly longer distances to build up endurance and homing skills.

To be sure, success depends on the uncanny navigation ability of the pigeons.

"When you take them places they haven't seen, homing pigeons come home. No other bird does that," Actis said. "A wild pigeon, we call them commies, has the ability to come from five miles away, but our racing birds must find their way 500, 1,000 miles or more."

Pigeon racers who move often will give their older birds to someone living nearby. Once in their new home, the racers will rebuild their flock with new birds hatched at the new location.

Birds occasionally get lost, however.

"I had one bird that didn't come back for a year," said pigeon racer John Cannon.

Another pigeon returned after a month with its neck slashed by a hawk's talons. The pigeon recovered.

Raised from babies

"If you own birds, you have to expect nature to take its course," Cannon said. "I try not to get too attached to them, but you can't help it when you band a pigeon in the nest as a baby, spend time with it, and talk to it when you're scraping the cages."

Races remain the ultimate test for the birds and their owners.

The night before a recent Saturday race, Actis and other pigeon owners brought their birds to the Martinez clubhouse for the race check-in.

Club race organizers held the birds over an electronic scanner that read an electronic chip on a band attached to the birds' leg.

This computerized information can be updated later when finishing times are added.

The racers joked, compared bird notes and ate barbecued sausages at the shoreline clubhouse decorated with photographs of top pigeons and members of the club.

The next morning, Actis was alone again, walking a wooden platform by his loft while waiting for the birds to return in two races from Nevada.

"They should be here," he said, squinting into the sunlight. "The wind might have slowed them down, or blown them south."

A week earlier, Actis' lead bird circled over his house for about 45 seconds before finishing. It lost the race by 30 seconds.

This morning, Actis' first bird arrived and passed promptly through the coop gate to trigger an electronic clock to record its finish time.

The bird didn't win, though.

Actis gave the bird a drink of electrolytes and a meal of light seeds with a low oil content. "You wouldn't want to eat a big steak after running a marathon," he explained.

Later, during the second race, Actis' first bird came in first out of a group of some 400 birds racing 250 miles. "It was a thrill," he said. "I'll be ready for next week."

ALF · November 1, 2006

WELL AT LEAST WE HAD'NT SEEN THIS 1 BEFORE ROLAND AND IT IS A NO BAD READ

November 2, 2006

Yes, very nice story, but I was surprised to see that it had been published in a chicago Newspaper, Chicago is the City that has banned pigeon keeping within the city Limits.

November 2, 2006

WELL AT LEAST WE HAD'NT SEEN THIS 1 BEFORE ROLAND AND IT IS A NO BAD READ

HOW DID YOU MANAGE WITH NO PHOTOS TO LOOK AT

THE FIFER · November 2, 2006

well done roland, good to see something like this on the forum, can do with a lot more pigeon related threads.

MsPigeon · November 2, 2006

Wonderful article roland! It is hard for non pigeon writers to capture the essence of pigeon racing and this author did a great job.

Carol

Roland · November 2, 2006

Well Ken Livingstone is not a pigeon lover by any stretch of imagination... and Animal right / animal lovers are at it in trafalger square qith a loop hole and feeding pigeons ... they send the Cleaners out constantly to sweep the feed up ... what a waste of taxes...