Pigeons Take Off
The racers are edgy and sidling about. They gulp softly in chorus as Mike Morrison approaches the loft in midafternoon.
They know what’s up. The predatory Cooper’s and red-tailed hawks in the area probably have hunted their fill since morning, and the racers have been filling with the urge to do what they were bred to. Morrison opens the small door to the screened-in shed, and the entrance fills with a stream of a hundred racing pigeons, beating for the sky. They wheel en masse high over Morrison’s three-quarters of an acre in the mid-San Fernando Valley, punishing the air with their wings as they wind south, gliding with a quiet whoosh, like wind in a canvas sail, as they curl north again.
“This is, for them, fun,” Morrison says. “This is play. This is what they look forward to.”
The old and peculiarly addictive sport of pigeon racing is in full flourish here.
Each November, the Fernando Valley Pigeon Racing Club, which dates to the late 1930s, sponsors Snowbird, an annual 400-mile race with a $50,000 first prize. Snowbird is the biggest race in the United States, and the seventh-largest in the world. (The Million Dollar Pigeon Race in Sun City, South Africa, with its $200,000 first prize, is the largest.) With an entry fee of $200 a bird, it drew 2,000 racers from more than 800 breeders last year.
In the last few years, the Fernando Valley club, which is composed of 52 racing pigeon breeders, has been joined by the similarly named San Fernando Valley Pigeon Club. The membership of the latter has exploded from three to more than 50, and includes racer breeders as well as breeders of exotic strains of show pigeons known as “fancies.” Several smaller clubs also have Valley breeders as members.
The Valley’s pigeon racing status probably has to do with its rural history, which has left many sizable lots, such as Morrison’s, zoned residential-agricultural. The Los Angeles Municipal Code requires that pigeon lofts be at least 50 feet from owners’ residences, and at least 150 from neighboring houses.
Modern pigeon racing emerged about 200 years ago in Western Europe. Belgium, with an estimated 300,000 breeders, is considered the Holy Land of pigeon racing, and most racing birds in the United States trace their ancestry to strains developed in Belgium.
The American Racing Pigeon Union, the largest such organization in the United States, has 11,000 members. About 1,000 live in California, more than in any other state.
A pigeon race is something of a logistical feat. Breeders typically enter 10 to 30 birds. They band them and take them to a central collection point where they’re placed on a truck and driven as far as 700 miles away. At dawn the next day, they’re released. Then the breeders wait for their birds to come home. Each loft has been surveyed for its precise distance from various standard release points. As birds return, their bands are removed and their times of arrival entered into a “pigeon clock.” This information, from all participants, is fed into a computer, which calculates each bird’s average speed. The fastest bird wins.
Racers typically can fly 40 to 50 mph, and, with tail winds, reach 70. They fly so fast that hawks can’t catch them on the wing, only after they’ve alighted somewhere.
To prepare for races, dedicated breeders truck their birds week in and week out to distant places for training flights, then turn around and drive home to await their arrival.
“The lazy people are the ones who breed fancies,” says 70-year-old racer breeder Hratch Kludjian of Malibu. “The racing breeders are the guys who want to kill themselves and get angina.”
The soul of pigeon racing, and its enduring mystery, is the bird’s powerful homing instinct. A racing pigeon yearns only for the loft it knows. A grown racer from, say, Newark can’t be entered in a race in California because on being released it will head for New Jersey. Thus, all pigeon racing, like all politics, is local. If a New Jersey breeder wishes to enter a bird in Snowbird, he or she must send it to a Southern California breeder when it is 4 or 5 weeks old, young enough to adapt to a new loft. The California “handler” then will train the bird for six to eight months. After the race, the bird typically stays with the California breeder. If it is returned to New Jersey, it can be bred, but usually can’t be allowed to fly, lest it make for the West Coast.
“Some birds can be resettled to other lofts,” says Rick Phalen, executive director of the American Racing Pigeon Union, “but it is high-risk, and you’re generally working against Mother Nature.”
Racer breeders exploit the birds’ homing instincts to improve performance. The birds, which are famously loyal to their mates, are encouraged to breed, not only to produce offspring, but also to intensify their yearning for home when they’re released in a race.
This is especially true of hens.
“Hens really fly faster than males,” says Morrison. “If they have eggs to return to, they fly even faster. And if they have babies, well, that’s as fast as they’ll go.”
To breed and race pigeons is to embrace considerable expense and sizable inconvenience. A chick from a champion racer can cost $1,000, and one from an accomplished parent $200 or $300. Morrison, a 48-year-old lawyer, estimates that he puts in 15 hours of labor a week on his couple of hundred birds. Then there is the risk of ending up in a love lock--becoming too attached to the bird.
“It starts with the bird rather than the person,” Phalen says. “As you work around them every day, you come to recognize that this is a very, very special bird, one who is relatively intelligent, one who is an incredible athlete, one who has some of those qualities we tend to, deep down inside, admire and respect--that love of home, and love of mate and offspring. Those are the natural magnets of the birds to us human beings.”
Breeders tend toward a kind of fatalism in this regard, says Fred Frobose, a renowned North Hills breeder and past chairman of Snowbird.
“I have been in pigeon racing for 60 years,” he says, “and trying to get out of it for 50.”
