Colombofilia, a forgotten sport dear to the heart of many Mexicans

by johnnymarin | Sep 25, 2018 | Pigeons in the News

While the media in Mexico are forever filled with chatter about futbol and béisbol, there is another sport dear to the heart of many Mexicans which rarely ever makes the news.

I’m talking about pigeon racing, which has been practiced as organized competition in this country since 1936. Nowadays this sport is most popular in Jalisco and Michoacán. The city of Guadalajara, for example, is home to some 1,100 pigeon fanciers, who put up to 45,000 birds into competition every year.

In Spanish, raising and racing pigeons is called colombofilia, which comes from the Latin word columba, which means dove or pigeon in English and paloma in Spanish. Pigeon fanciers say it is both an art and a sport, because it involves raising and caring for the bird, protecting it from sickness and training it to be a deportista (sports competitor).

In Greater Guadalajara there are approximately 25 clubs and every year they hold two big events: one competition for birds over a year old and another for yearlings, young birds, which are called pichones in Spanish.

Whoever wants to compete must register with a club which sends a representative to your house to take the exact GPS coordinates of your pigeon loft. Then, those of your birds that will compete are fitted with a band containing a radio-frequency identification chip which is registered in a very sophisticated electronic timing scanner which you must purchase.

Let’s say the competition is for yearlings who must fly from Zacatecas to Guadalajara, a distance of about 300 kilometers. Typically, some 25,000 birds may be registered for this. All these birds are driven to Zacatecas in specially modified trucks and are simultaneously released in some remote spot early in the morning.

Back in Guadalajara, the pigeon owner anxiously waits for his or her bird to arrive. When it does, the chip is recognized by the electronic scanner and the exact time of arrival is registered.

Next, the scanner must be carried to the club and its information transferred to the club’s computer. The computer then divides the exact distance flown by your bird by the amount of time it was flying and determines, on average, how many meters per minute the bird flew.

These calculations are important because the lofts at which these birds are arriving are scattered all around metropolitan Guadalajara, so the distance each flew from Zacatecas is slightly different. One bird’s average speed may differ from another’s by a fraction of a second.

I learned all this from Juan Jorge Padilla, a Guadalajara-based veterinarian who specializes in pigeons and doves. “How did you get interested in these birds?” I asked him.

“I was five years old,” Dr. Padilla told me, “and lived next door to a neighbor who raised pigeons. Well, they grabbed my attention because — unlike chickens — they could fly and they always came back. So my father bought a pair of pigeons from our neighbor and I started caring for them.”

“How do you train a pigeon to become a deportista?” I asked.

“Well, first you must understand that these pigeons are twice as big as ordinary ones. It’s like comparing a thoroughbred horse with one that pulls a hay wagon. For training them, you start off by letting your pigeon fly around at home so it gets to know its own rooftop. Then, when it’s three or four months old and used to being on its own for at least an hour, you take it on trips five kilometers away, to the north, south, east and west, so it begins to develop its sense of orientation. You let it loose and it starts to fly and it comes back to its loft.”

“What if a hawk spots it?”

“Yes, this happens — or they are shot by a hunter and they come back missing feathers, or a tail, or they don’t come back at all. Some of mine have returned wounded and you can tell what happened to them. An injury from a BB gun and a wound from a hawk’s claw are very different. But you stitch them up, you heal them, and they survive.”

I asked Padilla how far homing pigeons have been known to fly and he told me a story related in The Book of the Racing Pigeon by Carl Naether. It seems that in February of 1930 a blue-blooded racing pigeon bred at Elmont, Long Island, in the United States was sold for breeding purposes to a mining engineer in Caracas, Venezuela.

In May of that year, Miss 1303, which was her name, escaped from the engineer and in August 1931 she was found in her old loft, in fine condition, even though she had flown more than 3,000 miles from South America to Long Island.

The story of Miss 1303, however, pales in comparison with a report by John Frazier Vance, writing in Scientific American. In his article What Brings Them Home? Vance says that an experiment was carried out on August 15, 1931 at Arras, France, to see if a homing pigeon could find his way back to Saigon, Indo-China, 7,200 miles away.

The bird, which is unnamed, is said to have arrived at his home loft on September 9, only 24 days after takeoff.

The more I heard about raising homing pigeons, the more I came to understand that la colombofilia is a rather expensive hobby. However, Juan Jorge Padilla told me the first prize for a competition in Guadalajara might be a mere 5,000 pesos, with 4,000 to 1,000 pesos going to the following four winners.

“You can definitely make more money raising canaries,” he told me, “but your emotional connection with the canary will never be anything like what you feel for una paloma. The pigeon you can hold, you can caress; you witness the birth of its babies, you suffer if it comes home hurt.

“We say this bird is tame, but the moment it’s on its own it must become wild, it must find its food and water; it must ride out storms, navigate in fog; it must avoid cats, possums, mountains and dangerous air currents. It must survive.”

“It can fly up to 120 kilometers per hour with a favorable wind,” Padilla continued. “but a hawk could catch up with it if the pigeon is tired. Then, at the last moment, the bird must have nerves of steel and execute a ‘barrel roll’ like those performed by fighter pilots to escape those sharp talons.

“That’s why you don’t really care if your pigeon wins, but what satisfaction you feel when it suddenly appears on your roof after a flight of hundreds of kilometers! You raised that bird from a little hatchling, as if you had personally trained a marathon champion from babyhood on.

“This satisfaction, seeing it arrive, maybe seeing it win, simply has no price! It is unique and it holds a special place in your heart and in your soul.”

About Pigeon Patrol:

Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.

Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)

‘Auntie Pigeon’ warned neighbours’ health comes first

by johnnymarin | Sep 24, 2018 | Pigeons in the News

Laksi district officials on Thursday sanitised the house of an old woman who for decades had been feeding a large flock of wild pigeons and ignoring neighbours’ complaints about the mess they caused and the risk of disease. “Auntie Pigeon”, as she is known in the area, was also warned to stop doing it or face fines or even imprisonment. Laksi district chief Khajeerat Jaynakhom led a team to clean up the bird droppings and left over food that begrimed the two-story terrace house and its surroundings on Kosum Ruamjai road after a neighbour finally made an official complaint. They also disinfected the area. Mrs Khajeerat told 70-year-old Dueanchai Pengpreecha to stop feeding the birds because she was in violation of  public health and cleanliness laws. She would be liable to a fine of up to 25,000 baht or even a jail term of up to three months if she persisted. The law prohibited people from feeding animals in public places in a way that would trouble neighbours, the district chief said. Ms Dueanchai agreed to cease and desist. The district chief had her signed a written promise to do so. “Auntie Pigeon” said she loved animals and had fed dogs and pigeons at her house for decades. She had not known that she was breaking the law. The number of visiting pigeons had soared dramatically in the past few years and she had to increase the amount of feed she provided, and scatter it on both the ground and upper levels of her house, she said.

About Pigeon Patrol:

Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.

Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)

Elusive band-tail pigeons offer hunters a challenge

by johnnymarin | Sep 22, 2018 | Pigeons in the News

As the band-tail pigeon swung in over the gravel pit, I shouldered my Remington Wingmaster shotgun, swung my aim through the bird and fired. It folded and came down hard, and my Lab mix quickly retrieved it. My first shot at a wild pigeon had scored. “Not bad,” I thought to myself, “nothin’ to it!”

I wondered why so many bird hunters had told me that band-tails were a challenging bird to hunt?

I then ran off 21 straight shots without drawing a feather, chewing on humble pie the whole time.

Band-tail pigeons were once much more popular to hunt in the Northwest than they are now. The season was closed in Washington from 1991 to 2001 to let the population recover from over-hunting.

Over that 10 year period most hunters forgot all about them.

These backwoods relatives of the city pigeon are common in the wet forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is a sociable bird that gathers in large flocks as it makes its yearly migrations in the fall and spring.

They are a pastel gray-blue in color, and they can be told from their city-dwelling cousins by the long tail with a wide, pale band at the tip. A white neck crescent is also obvious when the birds are close. They have a black-tipped bill and yellow legs. Their call is a soft, owl-like coo.

And, they fly really fast. Even seasoned scatter-gunners will find them difficult to hit with any regularity.

They are also a wild mountain-loving bird that eats honest, wild foods, and they taste much better than any common pigeon could ever taste.

The band-tailed pigeon is the closest genetic relative of the extinct passenger pigeon. Like the passenger pigeon, band-tails were also hunted hard over the decades, which led to the closures. While the birds are now recovering, they still need protections.

For that reason, the season is short, eight days in total, and the bag limit is two per day. The season runs from Sept. 15-23.

Hunters in Washington will need a small game license, a state migratory bird permit, and a migratory bird authorization with a band-tailed pigeon harvest record card to hunt them.

The band-tails of the Northwest migrate along the Coast and Cascade mountain ranges from British Columbia to California. Hunters ambush them by positioning themselves along saddles that the birds pass over, rock quarries that offer grist for the birds, feeding areas, and mineral springs.

According to Eric Holman, a wildlife biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Region 5, the birds have a fruit and seed diet.

“They are fond of elderberries and cascara berries,” said Holman. “They also like cherries and other fruiting trees.”

“Look for places where they are going for food,” said Holman. “Try pass shooting as they come and go from the feeding areas.”

This heavy diet of fruit in the summer leads the birds to seek out mineral springs to gain extra nutrients. Therefore, mineral springs are great places to hunt for band-tails.

They also tend to sit on the very tips of tall fir trees, especially single trees that give the birds a good view of any approaching threat. Looking for these perched birds is a great way to find the flocks.

Holman reports that hunters take only about 100 to 200 band-tails per year.

“It used to be higher,” he said. “When it reopened in 2002 we would get six to seven hundred a year, but it’s been tapering off.”

He feels the newness of the hunts created some initial excitement when it first reopened, but the extra regulations may be putting some people off.

Either way, the birds are fun to hunt, taste surprisingly good, and offer bird hunting with almost no competition.

These are tough, wild birds, and they are hard to bring down. You had better hit them hard or they will just keep on flying. Forget the game loads, too. Try high-brass loads of shot sizes 5 and 6.

Band-tails have excellent eyesight, and if you raise your gun too early, or let your dog wander, it will spook the incoming birds. Stay well-hidden, and reduce movement if you want any quality shots.

They also have a whole repertoire of dirty tricks. They will sweep over your head from behind, sliding right over you in good range, and they are gone before you can shoot. They will turn on a dime right before they venture into range. And, they can duck and dodge better than a mourning dove.

In Southwest Washington, hunters should look to the tree farms. These actively managed lands tend to draw plenty of birds, but most private timberlands now require a permit to hunt them.

Still, they provide most of what the birds want, and hunters with permits should find them there in good numbers.

Hunters can look for DNR and BLM lands along the migration routes, too. A good pair of binoculars will help you spot the flocks as they move.

If you want a fun wing-shooting challenge, give these birds a try. However, unless you are a better shot than myself, prepare to be humbled.

About Pigeon Patrol:

Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.

Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products four years in a row.

Contact Info: 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD (www.pigeonpatrol.ca)