Newbie from Canada

[klorinth]

Hi to everyone from Winnipeg, Canada. I have been lurking here for a few weeks now. Just did my first post.

 

I am a complete newbie to pigeons. I do not have any and have never known anyone that did. All i can say is that I am a nature lover and have watched them my whole life. I now have the opportunity to develope a new peice of property in the country. This means building everything from scratch. I finally get to have some of the poultry and animals that we had when I was a kid. i want to add to that list though. And so I came to the idea of pigeons.

 

While I was doing research into old farm house design and construction, I kept coming across designs that had a dovecote included. These dovecotes were both in the House designs and Barn designs. I looked into this from curiosity and discovered the idea of raising squab on the old farms. Interesting history. I was amazed at how old the history of keeping and breeding pigeons is! I guess the more I read the more I became interested in pigeons.

 

There is no way that i could have a dovecote designed into the house of course. LOL I can just imagine the looks on the inspectors faces! They would scream health and safety violations. lol I can have a dovecote as an outbuilding though. They would consider them to be the same as poultry.

 

Once I decided upon pigeons I needed to decide what I was going to do with them. Chickens, turkey, ducks, etc are for food and fun. But what about pigeons. Well I have decided that I would really like to fly them. I already breed dogs and go to dog shows, so the Fancy ones are not for me. I do like the rollers and the homers though. That is the kind of thing I could enjoy doing. Come home after work and send the rollers out for a fly. That sounds good. It would also be fun to train some homers and see if I could join the local guys. A couple of them have already said that they would be happy to help with a couple pairs of homers to start with.

 

As always I have found that I have obscure tastes in pigeons as in everything else. When it comes to rollers I was immediately attracted to the Oriental Rollers. I like them. Of course they are really hard to get in Canada. Go figure. I have found one of the only breeders in the country though. The club has been very welcoming, so I can get around the distance problems. I would need to bring birds in by flying them across half the country. For those of you that have never been here, that would be a 5 hour flight, on a big commercial plane. Not to mention the driving he would need to do just to get to the airport. A full day of travel time for the birds. Not great, but necessary.

 

All of this leaves me trying to plan out what I need to do this summer in order to prepare for birds. New loft, feeders, waterers, heaters, and anything else that I can think of. I am looking forward to learning lots from everything written here. I will especially need help from those that have had an open loft with free flying birds. This is one of the things that I would like to look at doing.

 

Thanks for everything.

[the pigeon_milker]

hi hope you fall in love with pigeons like i did there are great good choice but i keep racing birds only only prob with open loft with free flying birds is the hawks will soon learn were they are and start to eat them

[Guest shadow]

welcome :) :)