The Thoroughbred Racing Pigeon

By J. Kilpatrick

This vintage volume contains a comprehensive guide to thoroughbred racing pigeons, with information on their natural history, breeding, selection, types, and more. Containing a wealth of interesting and practical information, this timeless handbook will be of considerable utility to the modern fancier, and would make for a worthy addition to collections of allied literature. Contents include: “Racing”, “The Breathing System”, “The Digestive Organs”, “The Bird’s Eye”, “The Homing Faculty”, “Bird Flight”, “Marey’s Experiments”, “Genetics”, “Breeding”, “Apropos Origins”, “Pure Strains”, and “Your Questions Answered”. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this vintage book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on pigeons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rowlands Press
• Release date: Jan 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528762724

Book preview

Chapter I

RACING

Although I had been without pigeons for some years prior to 1933, I never lost touch with the fancy. In my many discussions with fanciers on subjects pertaining to the sport I found general disagreement on almost all important points.

As I myself held considered opinions on most of the topics dealt with, I decided to get back into the sport, not so much to win prizes as to find out just how many of my arguments were correct, and to prove to my own satisfaction at any rate that there is more in the pigeon game than most fanciers would allow. I began right away to experiment with different methods of racing, training, feeding, and breeding. The material collected together in this book is largely the result of my labours.

First of all, in order to understand the tools with which I was working, I dissected dozens of pigeons, my object being to find out how the muscles worked, which muscle or set of muscles were responsible for moving the wings, where the internal organs were situated in the body, and how they functioned, and anything else that was likely to give me a better understanding of the bird.

FEEDING—To keep pigeons in good health and under proper control it is necessary to limit the amount of food they are allowed to carry in their crops through the day, and although they may seem to be starving, judging by the way they come running for food, yet if they get one full feed before going to their perch each evening, they will consume as much food as if they were allowed to sit about with full crops all day.

Treated this way, they are much more appreciative of their food, the feeder, and the place where the food is to be obtained.

TRAINING—After trying the customary one mile, three mile, and five mile tosses, and so on, by gradual stages up to fifty miles or thereabouts, I now use only one training stage, and that is a railway station, about fifteen miles distant from my loft, where there are no wires likely to interfere with the birds when liberated.

Both old and young birds get this for their first and last training stage, after four or five tosses at this point they are ready for the races. The object is not to get them into condition, healthy pigeons do that for themselves at home, but to teach them to get out of the basket and home quickly, where they soon learn that food is waiting for them. I can see no reason for giving them gradual stages up to this distance; why, when flying about their loft they have a view of the country for over fifteen miles. Any bird that cannot find its way home from this distance first toss is, in my opinion, not worth keeping; in any case I have never lost a bird at this distance because, as they are not sent off before mid-day, I can select good days, and so they seldom meet adverse weather (they get enough of this when racing).

At other times, I have tried sending the birds straight into the races without any preliminary training whatever. I then found that the returns were just as satisfactory as when they had had several training tosses, though the velocities were much slower. It was not until the third or fourth race that the birds really started to show any speed. From this, I came to the conclusion that if you want to score in the early races, the birds cannot have too many short training spins.

RACING UNPAIRED BIRDS—The greatest failure I ever had was in the year I tried to race unpaired birds. No youngsters were reared that spring. The cocks were flown from the old bird loft and the hens from the young bird loft, where they had spent the winter. The cocks were raced one week and the hens the next. It is hardly necessary to mention the trouble I had to keep the hens from laying, but I managed it by reducing the protein content of their food and severely limiting the quantity. This did not prevent them from looking fit—they showed all the signs that we are told to look for in pigeons which are in condition. The same with the cocks, every one who handled them at the marking station remarked on their condition, but could not understand why they were always nearer last than first in the race results. Neither could I, until one day I watched some of them flying round for more than ten minutes with my neighbour’s birds, instead of coming into their own loft. That settled it. I decided it was hopeless to persevere with birds that were fooling about with other pigeons, instead of coming home. So, about the first or second week in June, I put them together, and, when I got them down on eggs, they started to show what they could have done, had they been given some inducement to make them try.

Four of the last five races that season were disasters, and it is now history that I was the only person in Ireland that year who succeeded in timing in a bird in every race, including the two National races from France. And it was the hens which had been on starvation diet for so long that scored in these four most trying races:

One thing I learned from this experiment was that pigeons require some inducement to make them race. Without either nest box or mate to come home to, they will not make the necessary effort.

WIDOWHOOD—Whilst dissecting pigeons in various stages of brooding, I found that almost as soon as the birds started to sit, the milk glands became active. At first there is little sign that things are not normal, but by the tenth day of brooding, the crop, which under unmated conditions is a thin, almost transparent membrane, without the sign of a blood vessel, becomes covered with a net-work of red veins. This is the first sign that the milk glands are active, although the process leading up to this condition must have been taking place in the bird’s body from the time it started to sit. At the fourteenth day, the milk can be seen gathering on that part of the crop which forms pouches on each side of the neck, close to the gullet. By the time the eggs are due to hatch, the walls of these pouches have become covered with semi-solid milk, until they are more than a quarter of an inch thick, and ‘the whole crop has increased in weight by over one ounce.

It does not require a knowledge of biology to understand that when milk is forming in the body of any animal, the whole system is thrown out of gear, and that it is impossible for a pigeon, or any animal, in this condition to be in perfect racing form.

Here was the secret of the widowhood system of racing. This explained why birds raced on this system always looked well, and why they could stand the physical strain better than birds which were racing and breeding at the same time, as in the Natural System. Remember that milk forms in the crop of both cocks and hens when sitting on their own or dummy eggs.

I decided to put my theory to the test, so the following year I paired up about the last week in February, and reared one round of youngsters. As soon as they were weaned, I separated the parents, putting the hens into the young bird loft.

From that time on, the cocks had their liberty from 3 p.m. until 10 a.m. next morning, going in and out of the loft at will. When they were called in the hens were turned out and their loft closed. Not one of them ever attempted to stray, they spent their time trying to get into the cocks and every few minutes they were away for a fly. This they kept up until they were called in at 3 p.m., when they got the only feed of the day, about one ounce per head. The cocks got their feed at about the same time, the only difference being that they got as much as they could take with nothing left over.

EXERCISE—The question of what is suitable exercise has concerned fanciers for all time. Now, as I have neither the patience nor the time to stand flaging my birds for half an hour, they never got any forced exercise, nor did they need it. So far as I could judge they kept themselves in condition by taking a lot of short flights. I am fortunate in not being bothered with cats, but if it were a choice between forcing my pigeons to fly for half an hour or closing the loft, and letting them do as they pleased for an hour, I would prefer the latter. It requires a much greater muscular effort for the pigeon to launch its body into the air than to remain air-borne: the tipplers prove this contention for these little birds can keep on the wing for sixteen hours at a time with very little effort. In any case, I find that my birds are racing better now than when I was giving them forced exercise. Unlike mammals, the breathing capacity of birds is not improved by exercise (See chapter 2).

Some fanciers object to the birds being allowed to sit outside the loft, believing that it teaches them to sit out when returning from the races, but I have not found it so.

I will now give a description of the nest boxes in my loft, as these have a lot to do with this system of racing. Each box measures 27 inches long, 19 inches deep and 16 inches high. The entrance to each nest box is 10½ wide by 8 inches high. This is closed by a solid door which, when open, serves as a perch, where the birds must rest, as there are no other perches in this loft. There is plenty of room for the cock and hen to sit side by side. Other advantages the large opening has over the small 6 inch by 5 inch doors, usually seen in pigeon lofts, are that the nest pan can be removed without taking down the front, the cock and hen have plenty of room to pass each other when entering or leaving the box, and, if a cock blunders into the wrong box, the rightful owner can evict him before eggs or young are destroyed. The cocks are always fed in their boxes, and, as soon as I appear with the corn, every cock is to be found in his nest box waiting. Any that are not, have to do without, but it is seldom one misses a feed.

Each nest box is fitted with a lath partition hinged on the top, which can be turned up out of the way when not in use and kept there by a turn-button. As soon as the cock enters his box, this partition is let down and he is confined to one side of the box, leaving the entrance clear so that the hen can occupy the other side. Now the hens are let out of their loft, and as soon as they see that the cocks’ loft is open, in they come, and in two minutes every one of them is closed in the box along with her mate. No chasing round the loft after them, no fuss, no trouble to basket. When either sex returns from a race or training toss they fly straight into their boxes, where their mates are waiting for them, and there is no time lost in catching them.

Now for the result of my experiment of racing hens under the widowhood system.

Owing to transport difficulties due to the war, we in Northern Ireland were restricted to a limit of six birds per race, on that account I did not have the opportunity of trying out as many birds as I would have wished, so I put six cocks and six hens into training, and