Racing Pigeon Owners Careful to Dodge Flak From Neighbors

Quietly, before the neighbors awaken each day, dozens of South Bay residents go out to their dew-laden back yards to enjoy a sport that has been getting some of them in trouble.

Whistling and clucking softly to their athletes, they round up a practice team and send them winging away. After a few darting circles, the team disappears into the morning sky.

Pigeon racing, often regarded as a barnyard sport, has been a little-noticed part of city living for decades. Enthusiasts say more than 90% of all American pigeon racing takes place from lofts tucked away in city and suburban back yards.

As cities have grown and people have moved closer together, however, pigeon racers have begun to ruffle their neighbors’ feathers.

In Torrance, the feud between racer and neighbor has blossomed into a full-scale pigeon war. Two pigeon racers in the last three months have faced City Council hearings on whether they should be allowed to keep their birds.

The first, Paul Woehlcke, won a narrow victory but has decided to move out of the area, in part because neighbors remain angry at his 75 birds.

Council members reached a six-month compromise on the second racer, Roger Mortvedt, that requires him to reduce his flock from 100 pigeons to 60 and limits how often they may fly.

A third man, Vince Orefice, testified to the City Council on behalf of his racing colleagues and now fears for the future of his own birds because he has been ordered to apply for a city pigeon-keeping permit.

Without the permit, Orefice would be allowed to keep only four pigeons, far fewer than the 50 or 60 birds South Bay racers say they need to be competitive.

If any neighbors complain, Orefice could face city hearings on his flock.

The battle over the South Bay’s roughly 70 pigeon racers is not new.

A similar fight flared in Manhattan Beach four years ago when a pigeon racer’s birds were accused of messing up neighbors’ yards. In Torrance, pigeon fanciers were banned in 1965 from keeping more than four birds after a man who trapped and bred wild pigeons in Hollywood Riviera allowed his flock to sit--and drop--on a neighboring Superior Court judge’s house.

The law remained unchanged until February of this year, when Mortvedt and Woehlcke, threatened with losing their flocks, persuaded the City Council to approve a special permit allowing the sport.

Many cities have laws banning large flocks of domestic pigeons, but the fanciers who race the birds in those cities either are not aware of the laws or believe that they will not be enforced if owners keep a low profile.

Several anti-pigeon Torrance residents, still smarting from their two council defeats, have founded a new community group they call RAP--Residents Against Pigeons--to make sure the issue remains high-profile.

In a newsletter that sports a logo of a chirping bird with a black line through it, the group insists that pigeon breeding should be banned from densely populated areas.

Citing health studies that say pigeon guano can carry a number of dangerous airborne diseases, RAP argues that each pigeon racer endangers scores of his neighbors.

Form of Poultry Raising

“It’s a form of poultry raising. We have only 6,000-square-foot lots, so we’re living on top of each other here,” said David Brent, one of the group’s founders. “This belongs on a farm. Pigeon breeding in a congested area like ours is not appropriate.”

Mortvedt’s outraged neighbors agree. A parade of them appeared before the Torrance City Council last month to complain about droppings in their yards, on their cars and in their pools.

“We feel like a prisoner in our own home,” said John Perparas, who lives two houses away from Mortvedt. “They do defecate in flight. I have seen them.”

Perparas complained that when it comes time to sell his house, he will be forced to disclose information about Mortvedt’s pigeons to potential buyers.

“Which house would you buy?” he asked the Torrance City Council during debate over the pigeons. “The one with 100 pigeons next door or the one without?”

Racers, however, say their birds are the victims of mistaken identity by observers who assume that wild pigeons seen roosting around the neighborhood are actually a domestic flock.

“To most people, a pigeon is a pigeon is a pigeon,” said Joe Arrigo, the Manhattan Beach racer who in 1985 won a city permit to keep his flock. “The public attention is drawn to all these birds that are nuisances, like the ones in parking lots and on public buildings that are not controlled. They do make a mess.”

Domestic racing pigeons are about as similar to the average wild “flying rat” pigeon, fanciers insist, as a plow nag is to Secretariat.

Highly Bred Athletes

“They’re highly bred athletes, born for racing,” Mortvedt said. “They don’t hang out on fences and wires messing up the neighborhood because they’re trained not to do that. You can win or lose a race by seconds, so you don’t want them to get in the habit of hanging around.”

Racing pigeons released for exercise flights and races have not eaten in several hours, breeders say, leaving nothing for them to drop when they take to the skies.

“When any bird flies, it’s to his advantage to be as light as possible because when his weight is heavy it requires a lot of energy,” said Cornell University pigeon researcher Irene Brown. “Consequently, when birds take off, they usually relieve themselves of their droppings before they even leave the premises.”

RAP members are not convinced.

“They are not supernatural birds that are so well-controlled that they can hold it back forever,” Brent said. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and they circle the neighborhood and they do it.”

It is the perception that their birds are the scourge of their neighborhoods that has made pigeon racers throughout the South Bay a wary group.

During the racing season, which runs from September to November for young birds and from April to June for the older pigeons, racers from throughout the South Bay gather on weekends at their Hawthorne clubhouse--a borrowed room in the American Youth Soccer Organization’s headquarters.

Many racers interviewed during the preparations for a recent race from Fresno to Southern California told a reporter that they did not want their names used because it might attract attention to them.

“I’ve had my birds for 15 years and some of my neighbors still don’t know they’re there,” one racer said. “Why would I want to create a problem where there isn’t one?”

For many of the men--only three or four of the South Bay’s roughly 70 racers are women--pigeons are an essential part of their lives. Although racers usually only name a handful of their flock, each bird, they say, is special to them.

“I think of them as humans. Each one has a personality all its own,” said Danny Hinds, 62, a retired Sun Valley bread truck driver who now makes his living taking truckloads of racing pigeons from the South Bay and Orange County hundreds of miles to distant release points.

“One I named Mongoose, because he was a sneaky little devil. I’ve got one I call Bull Durham. He’s a mean bird,” Hinds said. “They just fascinate me, all of them. I mean, they only weigh 16 ounces, and they’ve got the heart of a lion.”

After several practice releases at increasing distances from their home loft, birds enter their first 100-mile race when they are only a few months old. The racing distance is increased roughly 50 miles each weekend of the season.

The night before a race, competitors take 15 or 20 of their birds to the clubhouse, where $500 racing clocks are synchronized and each pigeon is fitted with a numbered elastic leg band before being placed in spring-loaded holding crates.

Twenty or so birds are placed in each crate, with males separated from females to prevent any “hanky-panky” during the long trip to the release site, one racer explained. The crates are then fitted onto special trucks equipped to open all the doors at once at the start of a race.

During the preparation hours for a race, enthusiasts trade tips and enjoy some good-natured banter. Occasionally, the fastest birds trade hands for as much as $1,000 to become breeding stock in a new loft. Such sales are rare, racers insist, because young birds are often given away to help a new racer get started.

“We don’t do this for the money,” Mortvedt said. “If I was going to be paid by the hour for what I put into these birds, I’d be a rich man. The greatest thing for me is to win and be recognized.”

The following morning, trucks from several clubhouses meet at the assigned release point, which can be as far away as Oregon. After a short countdown, the crate doors spring open and a confusion of competing birds, sometimes as many as 15,000, thunder out in a whir of beating wings.

Looking like a swarm of bees searching for a hive, the pigeons circle the release point several times, climbing higher and slowly getting their bearings. Eventually they dart off, racing at speeds up to 60 m.p.h. toward their distant lofts.

Although scientists have discovered that homing pigeons can detect many things humans cannot--infrasound that is inaudible to the human ear, ultraviolet light that is invisible to the human eye and magnetic fields that are not detectable by the human body--they still are not sure how pigeons pull all this information together to find their home loft.

“The big problem is, how do pigeons know where they are relative to home?” Cornell researcher Brown said. “It’s one thing to get the compass headings down and know which way is north and south and all that, but how do they know which way is home? We’ve never found a pigeon carrying a little map showing where the release point is relative to home.”

As the birds filter down toward Southern California, owners who live closer to the release point call their more distant colleagues to report that the birds are on the way.

Anxious South Bay owners, warned by San Fernando Valley racers that the birds are coming in, stand in their yards ready to urge the arriving pigeons quickly into their home loft.

Catching each bird as it arrives, the owner slides off the pigeon’s elastic leg band and pops it into a chamber in his racing clock, where the time is recorded and sealed until a club official reads the results.

The pigeon that covers the greatest distance in the least time, measured as yards per second, is declared the winner. It’s not uncommon for some birds to travel more than 60 m.p.h. for an entire day to reach their loft.

In a recent race from Fresno, one of Roger Mortvedt’s pigeons came home so fast that he was not ready for her. The 6-month-old bird had been in the loft nearly a minute, he said, before he sealed her leg band in his clock.

In spite of the delay, the unnamed pigeon won second place--out of 12,000 birds.

After 31 years of pigeon racing, such results are not uncommon for Mortvedt, president of a three-club coalition called the Southern California Racing Pigeon Combine, which covers Los Angeles County from west Los Angeles through the harbor area.

In 1982, Mortvedt achieved the pinnacle of American pigeon racing: a national champion.

Only four or five such champions are selected each year in several age and competition categories, based on their record of victories and their speed during races. Mortvedt’s champion--which, like most of his other birds, is nameless--is now kept locked away as part of his breeding stock.

Mortvedt’s success also makes it even harder to think that he might have to give up the sport.