December 15, 2018

Please Pass the Pigeons

                                                                                         http://pigeonsfci.org/http://pigeonsfci.org/  

I'm back to blogging on light subjects. Humorous, silly, like certain holidays.  It's holiday time and we want to celebrate. Or escape, if only in imagination, gently sidestepping more searing questions of the day and the horrific suffering that still occurs in this interlocking, crazy world.
But what appears at first inessential, even trivial, can be a sign of a better world.
For instance travelling somewhere with a flock of birds, before climate change alters this treasured phenomenon.

Which brings us to the pigeon, this extraordinary bird.
We learned as children that passenger pigeons carried encrypted messages thousands of miles, during the Great War, and so on.
I thought they'd all died and gone to pigeon heaven, and we were left with millions of cocky urban pigeons who adorned parks and building ledges with white poop in cities everywhere.

Well pigeon training is alive and thriving. Breeding the Perfect Pigeon is a whole industry. It's a profession, a hobby, a passion, an obsession.
The world travels faster and faster. And pigeons are trained to race.
Meet Pepchi: looks like a pigeon, flies like a pigeon, and is a champion flyer and breeder.



"Up until World War II, pigeons were regularly used as couriers to deliver messages because of their keen homing abilities. But the sport itself predates that, going back as far as 19th century Belgium. 
It has since evolved into a full-on sport involving breeders, auctioneers, massive warehouses to store pigeons, and even bigger bets being placed (although it’s not officially legal in Europe to bet on racing pigeons). Several months go into carefully picking and training a specific breed of pigeon to yield the best results. Fanciers, or pigeon enthusiasts in this case, will often figure out specific diets and methods for training. But how does a pigeon “win”? Essentially, it’s the first pigeon to fly back to its home, or starting loft, in the fastest time. Race clocks (shown below) are used to time each pigeon."

But not all players play fairly. And you can't blame the pigeons.
In a major race from Shangqiu to Shanghai "men convicted in China after using bullet train in scheme to win bird contest."
 Friday August 31st 2018 page 3 of the International New York Times.


".....` the pigeon plot did not work....The essence of the plan involved training the pigeons to believe they had two homes. The birds had been secretly raised not just in Shanghai but also in Shangqiu.....the Shanghai Pigeon Association took all the entrants from Shanghai to Shangqiu and released them. Most of the pigeons started flying back to Shanghai.
But the four specially raised pigeons flew instead to their second home in Shangqiu......the two men caught the birds there and then carried them on a bullet train back to Shanghai, concealed in milk cartons (!!) When the men arrived in Shanghai, they released the pigeons, which quickly fluttered to their Shanghai loft, seemingly winning the race......"
Except the silly buggers had miscalculated and released the birds too soon. They should have kept the birds in their milk cartons a bit longer.
Other contestants protested, and the men turned themselves in.
And destroyed the evidence by (gulp) killing the birds - so they wouldn't become 'stool pigeons'!

* * * * *

Pipa, a Belgian pigeon website features a very young man, Sky Chen, who's already a serious collector and breeder.  I love Sky Chen's motto: eloquent and airy and mixed-metaphorical:

 “Once the dream takes off, life turns to be the sky. As the sky is of no end, the dream is of no limit!”  https://www.pipa.be/en/newsandarticles/reports/sky-chen-china-owns-one-most-exclusive-gene-pools-racing-pigeons-in-world


When these trained pigeons fly off on these long-distance races, they are winging it for a more unified world.
It's called racing, but it's also very much about our link with the animal world and our human fascination with the beauty of flight.