peteyandbrockdog asked:
i heard they drop off the pigeons and drive to another place… is this true?
i heard they drop off the pigeons and drive to another place… is this true?
how does pigeon racing work? i saw a van today that had racing pigeon team written on it and wondered about it
August 31st, 2009
4 Comments
CHEAP INTERNATIONAL CALLS
You are correct.
I personally have lost all respect for the industry and racing pigeon owners.
Every day other people rescue these birds, after they have been attacked by hawks, flown into power lines, and are downed by exhaustion and dehydration.
Racing pigeon associations band their birds to idendify the owners. However, after finding the owner, must people would be upset to learn that most of the owners will “neck” (kill) the birds who get injured or come back late. Bad racers are worthless to them. They are in it for the money, and nothing else.
I imagine that most if not all of the feral (wild-born) pigeon population is created by stray/loss/awol banded pigeons.
Pigeons have a very sweet temperment and don’t bite. If you should see one who needs help, don’t be afraid to do so. But you may want to research other options before returning the bird to the owner.
The last pigeon I found, had a broken wing. I found the owner, through a simple band search. I was happy to learn that the owner was a vet, with a clinic. How convenient, I thought.
I drove the bird 45 minutes to the clinic. The vet looked at his bird, said “He has a broken wing. He’s worthless. If you want him you can keep him.”
I was enraged. I forced him to treat the bird and set the wing – in front of a waiting room full of his clients. I also demanded food, and care instructions. I made sure I kept this *ss busy for a long time. The disgusted look on the face of his clients was priceless.
I took the bird home, rehabbed it, and gave it to a friend who has a small population in her barn. He flies just fine, but does not leave their farm. He’s still doing great, after two years.
If I ever find other pigeons, I will not bother with finding the owner(s). I have several people who would love to provide a home.
********************************
PIGEONGUY
Maybe you should read my answer more carefully.
The vet in my answer was the owner of the pigeon. He is one of the top 10 pigeon racers/breeders in my state. He told me “sick, injured and poor performers get culled”.
After 25 years of animal rescue, I have never heard of a pigeon owner going to pick up their bird. They all say the same thing. Give the bird shelter, food, water and rest – then let it go. If it’s injured – they’ll tell you to bring it to them, or keep it yourself. The fact is – most do not treat injuries. Those birds are culled (killed).
Culling is standard industry practice. It happens in most animal racing industries.
Breeders are breeding racing pigeons, not pets, not food. If the birds are sick, injured, don’t thrive, won’t train or are poor-performers they are generally culled. I found several on-line breeder sites that cull 85% of all birds every year – 85 out of every 100 are killed.
This is an expensive and competitve industry – there is no need to tend to excess birds, and a need to eliminate them as breeders. Large scale breeders will tell you that there is no way around culling. While there are small pigeon racers who will not cull, most of those have to find new homes for their excess pigeons.
I am not including people who raise pigeons as pets and do not race. They would have no reason to cull.
If you don’t believe me – maybe you’ll believe it from the breeders own mouths:
As for your comment about feral pigeons… Why do you think they are called feral pigeons? And where do think they came from?
from wikipedia:
“A feral organism is one that has escaped from domestication and returned, partly or wholly, to its wild state. Rarely will a local environment perfectly integrate the feral organism into its established ecology. Therefore, feral animals and plants can cause disruption or extinction to some indigenous species, affecting wilderness and other fragile ecosystems.”
Yes, there are plenty of banded birds living in the wild, and they breed. They are feral – their unbanded offspring are also considered feral, as are all of their descendants.
Further, feral pigeon populations, while revered in some countries, are considered pests in others. Feral pigeon populations in the US are culled by legal pigeon shoots, and illegal poisonings every year. It doesn’t help. It just opens up more food and area for remaining pigeons, who reproduce and repopulate the area.
Suzi’s answer is slanted and biased. Most of the breeders I know go out of their way to get their birds back when they are reported and quite often they have driven dozens of miles to get them for another breeder as well. Feral pigeon populations are NOT mostly caused by lost or injured race birds. I’m also a biologist as well as a pigeon fancier and have spoken to a lot of trappers. Banded pigeons are a definite minority in feral flocks of any sort.
Now, having said that – let’s answer YOUR question and not pay much attention to her — though I must admit that I, too, have had to deal with vets who don’t know the first thing about pigeons.
Here’s how the racing works. The pigeons are trained before the races begin. They are trained just like human distance runners – starting at shorter distances and then jumping them out to about 100 to 200 miles before being ready for the longer races (up to 500-700 miles). The birds are brought to the clubhouse the night before the race. There are they registered and countermarked (either electronically or with a numbered rubber race band (ring). They are then loaded onto a van – such as the one you saw and driven to the release point. At a specific time they are released and head home. No, the pigeons do not all go to the same place, in most races. They each fly back to their own loft. Once there, they are clocked in. The rubber band is removed and placed into a sealed time clock or the electronic signature of the electronic band is registered as having arrived. In either case, the bird is listed as having arrived at a specific time, down to the second. After the race is over, all the breeders go to the clubhouse where the fastest bird is determined. The speed of the bird is figured in yards or meters per minute. Since not all the birds are going to the same area, there is a build in time allowance for those that may have to travel farther than another one.
The hobby is an exciting one. There is nothing better than watching a bird that you bred, reared, and trained winging its way home from hundreds of miles away. Win, lose or draw THAT is the excitement of the hobby. If you’d like to know more, you can ask the American Racing Pigeon Union (if you’re in the States) to send you a small pamphlet for free. Their website is at:
Best
It is true that many pigeon racers will reject their birds if they are injured/ have not returned home, but most are not like that and to use that statement as a stereotype would be inconsiderate. Pigeon racers are not in it for the money, they do it because they love their birds, they love the sport, the competition, and fellowship. Pigeon racing is a good sport for all ages and is very popular around the world. What happens is the racers spend all year training and breeding their birds, and when race day comes all of the birds are shipped off to a release point. They wear countermark bands on their legs and when they return home the racer catches his pigeon, removes the mark and puts it into the clock to compute the average speed. The pigeon with the fastest speed wins the race. Prizes are often hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions in the big races. There’s a lot more to it, there’s whole books on it, but that’s just the basic idea.
Ok, here it goes. Say you have homing pigeons, and decide to race them. When they have babies, you put seamless bands on their legs [such as NPA bands]. Once the pigeons are old enough, they’ll leave the nest and start flying. Build a trap door in your pigeon loft. This is a door made a prongs that are designed to let things push through them to get in, but cannot push out [however you can lift it to where they can get out]. Open the trap door, when they come out, put feed inside the building and close the door. This is the beginning of training. Do this several times so that eventually, they will know that when you open the trap door, that is their only time to fly before the door is closed where they can’t get out. After they get in that routine, start taking them out from the loft and letting them go. Start out where they can see the loft clearly, and slowly work your way across the yard, farther and farther away until you can take them up the street or so and they will come back. Keep bumping the distance up until you think they have a good area that they are used to. THEN, enter a race. These range in miles, from 10 miles up to 500+ miles, depending on whether you’re in a local race with a little club, or something more major. Anyways, say you’re entering the 500 mile race [which I wouldn't suggest to be your FIRST race unless your birds are used to flying back from 50+ miles]. They set a location that is approximately that far from all the pigeon owners’ houses, and a time. They’ll give you a special clocking device. They take all the participants to the place and let them all go simutaneously at the set time, and the pigeons fly back. One your pigeon gets home and goes through the trap door, depending on what type of clock you use, you’ll stop the clock with the pigeon band. Some require you to stick the pigeon’s banded foot into the clock to stop it, some are installed on the trap door so that as soon as the pigeon comes through it, it identifies the pigeon band and stops the clock. It records the time the pigeon comes home, and from that they can calculate its speed, etc. By this they judge who comes in first place and so on.
I KNOW THAT WAS MORE THAN ASKED. But I felt like giving the whole info on pigeon racing. Or most of it…
Yes they let the pigeons out and drive off. They have no need in staying in that location once the pigeons leave. The birds come home all on their own, it’s their instincts. I could go into a whole lot of detail on how they come home so efficiently, but that’s off topic. If anyone has any pigeon related questions, email me at