Quote:
Originally posted by Evelyn
Quick version:
You raise them in a loft. You let them exercise daily by flying early morning for an hour or two ( they come back for breakfast....if you feed them first, they'll stay away for hours.)
there are two racing seasons.
For the six weeks before the races start, you "toss" them 2-3 times a week. Tossing is where you take them away starting at 5-10 miles away and release them. Then you gradually increase the miles from home up to 150 or so. Some lofts will take their new birds 30-50 miles away for the first toss to cull out the weak ones.
A 'new' bird or 'young' bird is a year old or younger. They have races for young birds and other races for old birds.
You belong to a local club. Then for the races, you take your birds down to the club the day before and big trucks go around to all the clubs and pick the birds up.
They drive the birds up north and release them all at the same time the next morning. The release sites start at 150 miles and go up to 750 miles.
Then your birds fly like bats out of hell, racing to get home.
When they get home they land on the landing board and walk through a little doorway into the loft. There is a special electronic band around their leg that has all their info. On the door is a reciever. When they walk through, the reciever marks them 'home'.
Your reciever is connected through a phone line to the main club which tallys the birds times.
Then they take the exact mileage from the release site to your particular loft and average out with the birds flight time, how fast they were flying and for how long.
Birds with the best times place.
The "SnowBird" race is like the kentucky derby for pigeons.
Babies born to the winner of that race can be sold for up to 10,000 USD. And the winner gets 250,000 USD
Sorry, that is not exactly the short version I hoped it would be, but even in it's length, it is still only a small fraction of the pigeon racing world.
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that is absolutely amazing...wow. the impressive part is that i read that entire post
seriously though, that sounds like a really cool different type of hobby (or sport). i've definitely learned something here tonight that i never expected