Homing In on Pigeons

They have been called the poor man’s racehorse, thoroughbreds of the air and racehorses of the sky.

But those who breed and train racing pigeons often just call them “homers.” With a good tail wind, champions can fly up to 70 mph and make a 600-mile trip from the Oregon border to their Orange County homes in a single day.

In Stanton, some are calling homing pigeons a neighborhood nuisance and are urging the city to approve a newly crafted ordinance that would limit their numbers, restrict their flying hours and require owners to get a permit. Complaints center on the “unsightly” appearance of backyard pigeon coops and the noisy release of large numbers of birds.

Homing pigeon enthusiasts worry that their feathered friends could become an endangered species.

“My pigeons are more quiet than dogs,” said Marius Nitulescu,a 45-year-old auto body worker who raised racing pigeons in Romania for 25 years before coming to the United States in 1983. His house is filled with trophies. He is a member of the California Flyers Invitational pigeon racing club and keeps about 100 pigeons in specially designed “lofts” in the backyard of his Stanton home. “Maybe they are trying to kill this sport, I don’t know.”

*

Neighbor Lowell Joslin, a retired fireman, has complained about Nitulescu’s birds for years. He can see the plywood lofts from his kitchen window across the street.

“How would you like to sit in my kitchen and look at Tijuana every night?” he said. “If everybody put up something like that, imagine what this neighborhood would look like.”

Councilman Harry Dotson said the city is just seeking middle ground between pigeon owners--the city has several--and their neighbors. The City Council is scheduled to review the proposed ordinance tonight, with formal adoption recommended for Feb. 25.

“You’ve got to placate the neighborhood for one thing,” Dotson said. “And you’ve got to let people know they’ve got to be good neighbors. The city has been considering this for a long time.”

Stanton is the latest among several Orange County cities to consider ordinances to regulate homing pigeons.

The proposed ordinance would require anyone with three or more pigeons to obtain a permit. A maximum of 100 pigeons would be allowed, depending on the size of the area where they are kept.

Owners typically release their birds once or twice a day for exercise. Under the proposed ordinance, no more than 40 pigeons could be released at a single time by a single owner and only two flights a day would be permitted, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. During races, when pigeons are released from locations hundreds of miles away, they would be allowed to break curfew as they make their way home.

The ordinance would also limit the height of pigeon lofts and their proximity to housing units and property lines. Commercial breeding would be prohibited and owners could be required to obtain a building permit for the construction of some types of lofts.

“I think it’s stupid,” said Frank Miser, owner of the Magnolia Bird Farm in Stanton. “There’s a lot of people who raise homing pigeons. I don’t know how they’re going to regulate all of them.”

*

But city officials say the ordinance is needed so they can respond to complaints.

“This is a funny sort of ordinance, to worry about pigeons,” Mayor Brian Donahue said. “But there’s currently no municipal code on them. If this is going to be a continuing problem, we need to consider this ordinance.”

In Anaheim, which has a similar ordinance, 84-year-old resident and pigeon racer Ed Ammannsays he has rarely had a complaint from neighbors. By keeping the neighbors happy, Ammann says, he has not had to contend with the city ordinance. He keeps about 78 pigeons in the back yard.

“It’s one of those old laws that nobody thinks too much about,” he said. “People used to raise chickens and the roosters would wake you up so early in the morning they had to get an ordinance. But I would rather have a person next door who had 300 pigeons than somebody who had a dog that barked all night long.”

Ammann, a member of the Golden West Homing Pigeon Club, has bred pigeons at his Anaheim home since 1956. He lets them out for exercise every day, except Sundays and holidays.

“You have neighbors who may want to have a barbecue or something and they see all these birds come flying over and they think, ‘Boy, I’d better get an umbrella.’ That’s how you can get into trouble.”

*

Most competitors keep their birds in top shape and train them not to stray, said John Hennessy, 70, a Garden Grove resident who first began training homing pigeons as a 10-year-old schoolboy in Santa Ana. Garden Grove requires a homing pigeon permit.

Hennessy was inspired by a lima bean farmer named Gus Callens, who brought the sport to Orange County from his native Belgium. Callens trained his pigeons in fields near the giant blimp hangars that are now part of the Tustin Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station. His birds were pressed into service during World War II.

“When the blimps went out to sea, they carried a little crate of pigeons, because radio communications weren’t what they are today,” said Hennessy, a member of the Orange County Homing Pigeon Club.

Many of the pigeon racers throughout California contribute the services of their birds to humanitarian causes. The City of Hope receives $70,000 in donations each year from pigeon racing clubs for medical research, part of the “Fly for Hope” fund-raising campaign.

“If we can go to bat for a pigeon flier, we will,” said Fly for Hope coordinator Joanne Ling. She is urging Stanton city officials not to believe some of the popular pigeon misconceptions. They are not noisy, she said, they coo softly during the day and are quiet at night. And their owners watch them closely for any sign of disease.

“It’s a sport where the pigeon is a valuable commodity, so owners usually take very good care of their pigeons,” Ling said.

*

At auctions, homing pigeons routinely fetch from $50 to $900 each. A prize homing pigeon once sold for $125,000, and a race held in Sun City, Bophuthatswana, last month offered a first prize of $250,000. The entry fee was $1,000.

Many of the pigeons are descended from a breed that originated during the early 1800s in Antwerp, Belgium, where Europe’s first races were organized. Hennessy said the sport is still popular there, where some top birds can fly 1,000 miles and stay in the air for 16 hours without stopping to rest.

“Through the lowlands of Europe, pigeon racing is just about like baseball is here,” Hennessy said.

In the United States there are about 15,000 pigeon racers, according to the American Racing Pigeon Union, a nationwide organization with 11,000 members in 875 clubs.

Rick Phalen, executive director of the Oklahoma-based organization, said urban density has created “an ongoing challenge” to those who breed and race homing pigeons.

“In parts of the country where we have generally moved away from animal agriculture, we have lost an appreciation for animal culture and of the relationship of man to animal,” Phalen said.

But the organization is not opposed to “reasonable” efforts by cities to regulate the care of homing pigeons, he said.

In Orange County, enthusiasts are struggling to keep the sport alive. Clubs have merged and participants are trying to recruit new members, said Earl Wenzel, a member of the AWOL Pigeon Club who has kept pigeons at his Garden Grove home for the last 35 years.

“Unless you get a complaint, the city won’t bother you,” Wenzel said. “It’s just sort of ridiculous to pick on a pigeon that’s up in the air and not bothering anyone. You let a cat out and they run around all night, but you don’t need a permit to own a cat.”