Young Birds that work back

[Chris Little]

One particular young hen we had in 2002 returned home 3 weeks late.

 

She was then raced as a yearling out to 300 miles with no problems.

 

As a 2 year old she flew well picking up club prizes then she was sent to the SNFC Falaise race and she won it

 

From that moment on I have vowed to give late young birds every chance.

[mealybar]

If you read the first articles of the sporting challenge in the BHW this year, nearly all of these pigeons had had knocks, time missing from the loft, been hawked, etc. even Auld Reekie was settled from another loft after racing as a yb. All pigeons make mistakes, it's the good ones that learn from them.

[snowy]

hope they do well,

as this is our first yr racing, westy has had quite a few come back after a few days to a few weeks, so as we have no yearlings to race, we are relying on the ones that are left for next yr & the next few yrs,

regards

[Roland]

I have also looked into that in the past and not been able to correlate good or bad tosses with particular K factor or sunspot activity.

What I find interesting, though, is that fanciers in some areas have had terrible returns this year while fanciers in other areas have had very good returns.

I do not think that we can argue that all fanciers with heavy losses just did not have their pigeons in good condition. We do not know exactly how these birds find home and they may depend for this on some local variable that we do not even consider, perhaps not even know.

[stevebelbin]

Definately keep them as they are street wise and will look after themselves in a tough race later in there lives. Its obviously down to the individual birds but they are best kept to at least have a chance, as at least they have used their brains on their own to work back :-).