Winning Ways With Widowers

By J. Langstone

This text contains a comprehensive guide utilising 'the widower plan' for pigeon racing, and does so in simple and clear language that will greatly appeal to both the novice and experienced fancier alike. Complete with helpful tips and handy information, this is a text that will be of much value to anyone with an interest in this pastime, and constitutes a worthy addition to collections of fancying literature. The chapters of this book include: 'The Loft and Fittings'; 'The Ideal Pigeon'; 'The Eye'; 'Breeding, Feeding and Rearing'; 'The Complete Fancier'; and 'Widows and Young Hens'. Many antique books such as this are increasingly rare and costly, and it is with this in mind that we are proudly republishing this volume complete with a new introduction on pigeons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473352292

Book preview

WIDOWERS

INTRODUCTION

However badly your birds are doing, the system of racing them on the widower plan will make them better. If a fancier is a corn chucker-down and leave it at that he will never do much good whatever way he flies his pigeons. The man next door who takes a little care will always beat him, and the one further up the row who takes a lot of care will beat them both.

To win with pigeons you’ve got to put the time in. No use paying top price for a successful fancier’s best birds only to find they do no better than the poor things you already had, on the mistaken supposition the blue bloods would win races in spite of poor looking after.

Successful fanciers are what they are because they give their minds to pigeon culture. All you who read this book, I beg of you make up your minds to follow this method day in and day out for twelve months and see the improvement. Regular exercise, regular cleaning, regular feeding, clean water. In the main it’s as simple as that to strike winning form.

People talk about the widower system as being for the man of leisure, as though it took no time at all to manage pigeons in the natural way, but every minute all day for widowers. Really, the time spent with the birds is about the same, widower or natural. If you have a wife or child who will give you ten minutes morning and evening to keep the pigeons exercising while you clean out, change the water and put in the first food, your widower pigeons will claim one hour of your time morning and evening with a good do through at the week-end.

This is not theory. I am giving you exactly as I find it. I clean out twelve widowers in two minutes. Instead of the muck being scattered around, you open up in the morning to find a neat pile in each nest box ready to be removed with a draw of the scraper. At the week-end I have a spring clean and spend an hour cleaning out and sweeping thoroughly.

The only striking disadvantage I find with widowers over natural is that whereas paired pigeons home days and weeks late the widower after the second day of a race rarely comes back at all. Once lost he stays away for good. Yearlings won’t fly at all as widowers. On the contrary, two years old and older are transformed.

My 1954 National winner, whose photograph appears on the cover, was a very ordinary pigeon as a paired yearling and two year old. In 1953 I made him a widower (to be exact, semi-widower) and he immediately responded as you see by his record on the frontispiece. This testimony in favour of racing separated cocks is there for all to see.

In Belgium, hens are raced widowed and cocks as absolute widowers. That is, the cock never has contact with his hen. The system, however, that is here explained is the one that correctly must be spoken of as semi-widower.

Most authorities speak of widowhood; why, I fail to recognise, since in almost all cases it is the cocks that are being raced and are being referred to. It is the widowers we are dealing with, and therefore it is the widowerhood system. No doubt I am being fussy, since it is easier to say widowhood than widowerhood. However, you see my point, and it is only on occasion moreover the hood is wanted to make the word over long to say.

So, semi-widower it is, the system that allows the hen to make contact with the cock once a week for the short races, say up to 300 miles, and once a fortnight for the longer races. I want all readers to believe in this system and to be convinced that nothing is hidden, and that it will result in success if faithfully carried out.

There are no secrets in pigeon racing. As one who has wondered what it was the successful fancier had that I hadn’t, I can tell you that it doesn’t lie in patent medicines or drugs or mysterious cake. Nothing is wanted that every corn merchant hasn’t in his shop and every chemist on the counter.

A fancier has to make up his mind it isn’t his pigeons that win races but himself. A racing car is built by man out of his knowledge, fed by minerals he has tapped from the earth and driven by himself. Without him, all would have remained buried. In much the same way the racing pigeon has been formed by man from fancy pigeons of a very different shape, and that in a period of about a hundred years, too. He breeds and culls, to improve his stock—always selecting—always rejecting—always with an eye on an ideal of shape. Sometimes he