Canker

Canker is more difficult to manage in breeding lofts that are still not established and continually introducing new birds.

Twenty words or less TCC Loft series

The Most Important Thing To Breed For Is Instinct

When a bird is found with that strong homing instinct and combined with condition, it will be a champion.

Charles Heitzman
Recorded by E. Lowell Robbins

Condition

After the evening's work is done with the pigeons and the loft, quietly open trap and take notice of those birds that come out and clap about; they are generally in highest condition.

W. S. "Billy" Pearson

Widowhood Old and New

Edited by Colin Osman

When the Racers Take Flight, Literally

The New York Times

By DEVIN SMITH

Published: October 26, 2003

SHIRLEY— LESS than 70 miles from New York City, where pigeons are widely regarded as feathered rats, fanciers gather to haggle over the price of thoroughbred racing pigeons.

Every week, on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons, as many as 60 people crowd into the back room of the Pigeon Store at 60 Northern Boulevard in Shirley to discuss breeds, eat doughnuts and occasionally buy a bird.

''Pigeons are a big deal around here,'' said Joan Schroeder, who works at the store and breeds her own birds. ''I nearly couldn't squeeze into the auction room last week there were so many people.'' Auctions are also held at the Pigeon Store's second location, in Lindenhurst.

On Long Island, an estimated 2,500 pigeon owners breed, fly and race more than 300 types of birds. The Nassau-Suffolk Pigeon Fanciers Club, which has about 100 members, holds three shows and a swap event each year at the Holtsville Ecology Center. Its biggest event, to be held on Nov. 15. this year, showcases about 2,000 birds, none of which would be found on a city street corner.

''The general public will always assume the pigeons we breed are the same as the ones they see in the park,'' said Deone Roberts, the spokeswoman for the American Racing Pigeon Union in Oklahoma City, a national organization that promotes pigeon racing. ''But that's like comparing a thoroughbred to a plow horse, or a champion show dog to a street mutt.''

There are some 1,000 pigeon clubs in the United States with membership ranging into the tens of thousands, the racing union estimates. Although no organization keeps track of the exact number of clubs, fanciers with decades of experience estimated that there are 12 to 15 on Long Island alone. Some towns on the Island require licenses for pigeon lofts, but fanciers said that that stipulation was honored mostly in the breach.

As with horses, the variety of pigeon breeds seems endless, but at the Pigeon Store's auctions, homing pigeons -- birds capable of returning to their home lofts from after journeys of thousands of miles -- constitute the largest number of sales.

Then there are the tipplers, or birds that can stay aloft for more than 15 hours; fancy birds, the result of crossing different breeds to create rare and elegant strains; and rollers, or pigeons that tumble as if shot in midair, only to spring back to life and surge skyward.

At a recent auction, iridescent green and gray homing pigeons fluttered nervously in their cages. As big-band music filtered through overhead speakers, a handful of men, mostly elderly and white, appraised the birds, preparing to stock up for the fall racing season, which runs from Labor Day to early November. Some unsentimental fanciers even buy large homing squabs for the dinner table.

The average price for a racing pigeon is about $5, but the cost of a bird with a champion lineage can rise into the hundreds, if not thousands.

On the day before a race, which may range from 100 to 800 miles, fanciers gather at their local club with the birds they plan to register. They load the birds onto the club's trailer for the trip to the race's starting point, called the liberation site. For Long Island fanciers, the sites are usually somewhere in Pennsylvania, Ohio or New Jersey, depending on the race mileage.

At dawn the next morning, club representatives release the birds and watch as they wing their way eastward. The bird that flies at the fastest average speed, measured in yards per minute using Global Positioning data, from the liberation site back to its home loft, is the winner. Most of the birds fly at speeds of 35 to 60 miles per hour, depending on the wind direction and velocity.

''Racing pigeons are little athletes,'' said Ms. Roberts, the racing union spokeswoman. ''They're racehorses with wings.''

Some fanciers have equipped their lofts with high-tech clocks and electronic landing pads that read transmitters on their birds' leg bands and automatically clock them in. The owners then take a printout of the times to the club sponsoring the race.

Tradition-bound fanciers do all this by hand. They wait for their birds with string paddles, or poling sticks, which resemble lacrosse sticks and are used to capture the birds when they arrive. The owners remove the leg bands and put them in capsules, which are placed in the slot of a time-stamp clock. When the fancier turns a crank, a capsule is stamped with the arrival time. Capsules are held in the clock's innards until the clock is opened at race headquarters.

But sometimes the birds don't come back at all. Predators, power lines, storms and strong winds all take their toll. ''You hate to lose them, but you can't beat nature,'' said Val Matteucci of Hicksville, a fancier for 40 years and the secretary-treasurer of the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers, organized in 1881. ''If they stop in a tree or hit a wire and fall to the ground, they can become prey very easily.''

Humans have used homing pigeons for more than 5,000 years to send messages over great distances. The United States Army used tens of thousands of birds in both World Wars and in the Korean War when radio silence was necessary or when communications had been disabled. Now pigeons are used by the military as a double-check on chemical-weapons sensors, much as canaries were once used by miners.

Scientists still don't know how homing pigeons find their way, but they believe that the birds pick up cues from the position of the sun and from geomagnetic fields.

In Europe, pigeon races often carry six-figure cash prizes, and each year, the Million Dollar Pigeon Race is held in South Africa. In the United States most fanciers compete only for diplomas and trophies, although the Snowbird Classic, which is sponsored by the Fernando Valley Club of Sun Valley, Calif., is expected to offer $100,000 in prize money for the first 10 finishers. The race will next be run on Nov. 20, 2004.

Gary, a fancier from Mastic Beach who insisted that his last name not be printed because he did not have a license for his 350-bird loft, said that feeding pigeons has some fringe benefits.

''Their droppings are the best fertilizer,'' he said. ''You scrape it up and throw it in the garden. In a few days, it pushes up tomatoes like forget about it.''

There are an estimated 2,500 pigeon fanciers and 12 to 15 clubs on the Island.; For the East Meadow club's 300-mile race last month, pigeons were transported in crates to the starting point in Somerset, Pa.

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The New York Times

Quiet

Quiet in the widowers loft, also means that you must stay away from the loft too.

Twenty words or less TCC Loft series

Pigeon racing enthusiasts keep disappearing pastime alive

VPR

Vermont Public Radio

Steve Zind - Williston, VT

Thursday, 09/13/07 5:33pm

(Host) Today take a glimpse at a disappearing pastime: the sport of pigeon racing.

"What's with the birds?" Well they're messenger pigeons. I'm going to release them and whichever get home first I'll enter in the county fair." "Pigeons, huh?"

(Host) That's a clip from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Even in the 1930s, Jimmy Stewart's trained pigeons didn't make much of an impression on the city folk. But all these decades later, pigeon racing is still alive and well.

On weekends, a group of Vermont enthusiasts pack up their birds and ship them off to distant locations in hopes they'll return home safely and swiftly.

As VPR's Steve Zind tells us, there's more to the sport than meets the eye.

(Zind) Tell Dick Zutell that his racing pigeons resemble the ones that you see begging for handouts in the park, and he'll give you a tolerant look.

(Zutell) "They look like the park pigeons, but they're not. We could tell you the pedigree and the lineage behind every pigeon, I mean back 50, 60, 100 years."

(Zind) Zutell and a few other racing pigeon enthusiasts have gathered in Williston with their birds in cages. They're being loaded into a trailer and shipped to New Jersey, where they'll be released to race back to their owners in Vermont.

These young pigeons were born in the spring - breeding them from proven racers is part of the art of the sport. All summer they've been pampered and prodded to fly fast.

Their race from New Jersey is the culmination of a summer of training that involves taking them out daily; first just a few miles from home and then further, to teach them to fly back to the roost. When they return, they're fed and coddled to reinforce the idea that coming home quickly is good, and chillin' with those pigeon n'er do wells in the park is not good.

(Zutell) "If they're going to sit down there and talk to their neighbors, no. We want them to race home."

(Zind) In the parlance of Zutell and his fellow pigeon racers, it's not just the birds who do the flying.

(Zutell) "I started flying in ‘47. I was 13 then. I belonged in a club in New Jersey. There was just a lot of flyers back then, there's not now. It's a dying sport and it's a shame."

(Zind) Zutell says there are just a handful of pigeon racers left in Vermont. Like him, many belong to the Champlain Valley Racing Pigeon Club. The sport probably reached its modern day peak in this country in the 1950s. The birds were used to carry messages during the Second World War and returning soldiers brought home an interest in racing them.

Peter Sapienza is a rare newcomer to the sport. Sapienza says he was attracted by the bond that develops between bird and flyer.

(Sapienza) "It's just a really full relationship with the birds who are coming back to be with you and to be in the loft. One of the things you need to work on is motivation."

(Zind) Motivation. That's where knowing a bit of bird psychology comes in. Pigeon racers fly both the male cocks and the female hens. In the hen, the maternal instinct is strong. Her desire to take care of her eggs makes Dr. Seuss's egg-hatching elephant Horton look like a slacker. To get a hen to fly home as fast as possible, interrupt her egg sitting duties and then send her off to race home.

Sapienza says flyers even try fooling the hen into thinking her egg is about to hatch.

(Sapienza) "People have been known to take little plastic eggs and put a fly in it and put it in the nest under the hen so that it rattles a little bit and will motivate her to come home."

(Zind) It takes about 7 hours for a good racing pigeon to fly the 250 or so miles from New Jersey to Vermont. For the victor, there's no prize money or trophy - just the satisfaction of having raised a winning pigeon, and the enjoyment of the sport

(Sapienza) "What we're out for is because we love the birds."

(Zind) For VPR, I'm Steve Zind.

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VPR Vermont Public Radio

Dietary Deficiency

by Dr Colin Walker

The Flying Vet's Pigeon Health & Management

Breeding is one of the times of year when supplementation with vitamins and [pink] minerals can give definite benefits. Feeding youngsters places a big nutritional drain on the stock birds and, when dietary levels are marginal, deficiency can develop, leading to disease problems. Most commonly during breeding, this involves the mineral calcium. No matter how much shell grit the birds eat once paired, they cannot assimilate sufficient to compensate for the amount lost in pigeon milk production and in the hens' egg shell formation. The difference is made up from calcium stored in the skeleton before pairing. This is why it is so important that birds have access to grit for the entire year. The amount that can be mobilized from skeletal stores is self-limiting, and when this threshold is passed, a number of problems appear. Calcium is necessary for normal nerve and muscle activity, and so the birds may appear reluctant to walk, floppy, and weak or just quiet. The oviduct is a muscle and should act as a muscular tube pushing the egg down. With a fall in calcium levels, it loses this ability, leading to egg binding. Similarly, if there is insufficient calcium to supply the shell gland within the oviduct wall, rough or soft-shelled eggs may be produced. The quality of crop milk may deteriorate with reduced levels of calcium, leading to soft bones in the youngsters. This is often best assessed where the beak attaches to the head.

Zsolt Talaber

Vets' Tips for Fanciers, adds

A lot of calcium is necessary for the development of eggshells and this macro element is necessary for muscle activity, too. The musculature of the oviduct needs calcium to push the egg down. Calcium deficiency causes abnormal eggshells and/or weakness of the oviduct; the outcome is egg retention.

If egg retention is frequent among your pigeons, your flock management is incorrect - the diet is probably wrong.

Annual Treatments

Why do we treat the same birds for the same illnesses. Give them up. They won't become or breed champions.

Twenty words or less TCC Loft series

Hours on the Wing Which Kill

The measure of performance is given in miles flown, but my experience is that it is the pace and hours on the wing which finds them out. Study the results of a few very fast races of over 300 miles or more and watch how quickly the velocities of the winning pigeons drop as pace takes its toll. Study any race where the winners are taking more than ten hours to do the journey and as a rule there will be empty perches at nightfall. It is pace and hours on the wing which bring exhaustion, and we will now consider what effect this has on the desires of the pigeons concerned as they plod on hour after hour. Physical exhaustion brings about an overwhelming desire for rest, so the fatigued pigeon stops flying. Furthermore, if my observations are correct, the next most desirable thing after rest will be water to drink. If the bird has found somewhere to rest and water to drink, a night's rest and the body's reserves will have replaced some of the losses, and the pigeon may resume its journey the following day, without having eaten any food. This raises the question of whether we prepare and condition our pigeons correctly to meet the task we set them, especially for the longer distances which perhaps involve a night out.

by Major A. Neilson Hutton

Pigeon Lore

1962

Apple Cider Vinegar (and other acids)

by Dr Colin Walker

The Flying Vet's Pigeon Health & Management

Adding apple cider vinegar, which is acetic acid, and other acids, such as citric acid, to the water is one of those older practices that at first glance seems like hocus pocus. However, they are of benefit and there is a scientific reason for their use. In health, the bowel is weakly acidic. This is because the normal bacteria found there produce lactic acid as part of their normal metabolism. With stress, [as in YB training & racing] these normal bacterial populations are disrupted and the pH within the bowel is altered. Harmful bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella do not like acidic conditions and so anything that helps to maintain the weakly acidic environment within the bowel helps to prevent these organisms from becoming established. The usual amount of apple cider vinegar to add is 5-10 ml to 1 litre of water, depending on product strength and local water pH.

Interestingly; the commercially available probiotic preparations, because they contain the normal bowel bacteria, produce lactic acid and this is one of the ways they help to maintain bowel health.