by Pigeon Patrol | Mar 16, 2020 | 4-S Gel Bird repellent, Animal Deterrent Products, Bird Deterrent Products, Bird Netting, Bird Spike, Bird Spikes, Pigeon Control, Pigeon Droppings, Pigeon Patrol's Services, Pigeon Spikes, Pigeons in the News, UltraSonic Bird Control
Japanese pigeon skips local race, lands on Vancouver Island instead
A Japanese racing pigeon truly went the distance, after he overshot a 1,000-kilometre race in his native country and instead traveled across the Pacific Ocean and ended up on Vancouver Island.
The remarkable bird was tracked back to Japan, where he was released May 10 in the northern province of Hokkaido to take part in a local race.
The one-year-old bird was set to compete along with 8,000 other pigeons in his native land, but instead was discovered on June 6 at Canadian Forces Base Comox near Courtenay, B.C.
The bird was turned over to the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society, where staff nursed him back to health.
Maj Birch, founder and manager of MARS, told CTVNews.ca Friday that the male bird was very ill.
“He was very weak, very thin and we did a test and found that he had a very heavy parasite load,” she said, adding that the bird was treated with a combination of fluids, food and medication.
Birch said she is not sure how the pigeon was able to make the trans-Pacific crossing, or which route he took. She added that this is not the first bird from Japan to end up on British Columbia’s shores.
“We don’t actually know whether he took that route or whether he managed to catch a freighter or several freighters” she said.
“There’s no way of knowing that, so we can only imagine that he had a wonderful journey,” she said with a laugh. “Because he was found at our air force base, maybe he rode the plane.”
Thanks to a tag on the bird’s leg, the society was able to identify and later contact the owner of the champion pigeon.
Owner Hiroyasu Takasu said he was shocked to hear the bird had survived.
“(Birds) usually reach their limit in a week, with no food or water. This is a superior pigeon,” he told ABC News.
He noted that only around 20 per cent of the birds that raced last month were able to finish the race.
He added that the bird was never given a name, because pigeons are only named after they return home.
However, Takasu declined to have the bird returned to Japan by plane, citing fears that excessive travel might put added strain on its health.
This led to some initial searching to find the pigeon a home, as he is essentially considered an “illegal alien” who arrived on Canadian shores without being imported, Birch said.
“I was concerned that there may be issues in trying to find a home for him here,” she said, adding that the society is not a sanctuary but a rehabilitation centre.
Luckily, an official with the Mid-Island Racing Club in Nanaimo, B.C. has agreed to adopt the bird. The club is reportedly considering breeding it to produce more “superior” pigeons.
This may be a smart move, as it was the pigeon mother who reportedly won the local Japanese race.
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Pigeon King scam, 7-year prison term for Galbraith.
KITCHENER – The folksy force behind a huge pigeon-breeding scam targeting conservative religious communities was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison.
Arlan Galbraith, 67, was convicted of fraud for luring hundreds of Canadian and U.S. farmers – mostly Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites – to raise birds at lucrative buy-back prices.
Investors lost an estimated $20 million when Pigeon King International, based in offices in a Waterloo commercial plaza, collapsed under its own weight in the summer of 2008.
Galbraith, who got his hands dirty and often did media interviews in overalls, insisted the eight-year-old business was a legitimate venture that was sabotaged by critics jealous of his success.
But after a month-long trial in Superior Court in Kitchener at which he entertained onlookers while representing himself, jurors concluded otherwise in December.
They accepted the prosecution’s contention the business was an unsustainable pyramid scheme that required more and more new investors to pay existing ones.
Crown attorney Lynn Robinson, who argued for up to 12 years in prison, called a former salesperson for the company to explain why Galbraith targeted traditional communities for sales.
Bill Top, who later resigned and actively warned people about the pigeon scam, said he once heard Galbraith and his former wife ridiculing those groups for their simple lifestyles.
“The strongest comment he made … was they were aliens and he didn’t know why they would live that way in this day and age,” Top told the hearing. “He thought it was a joke.
“It was business. It was money in his pocket. I don’t know if there was a
While promoting the scheme, Galbraith portrayed himself as the saviour of the family farm for giving farmers an opportunity to make money breeding pigeons.
Under the terms of five or 10-year contracts, he agreed to buy all the offspring back at rates virtually guaranteeing lucrative profits.
Early investors were told he intended to sell pigeons to hobbyists interested in them for sport.
But by the end of the scheme, Galbraith’s pitch had morphed into establishing a vast network of breeders to process baby pigeons for meat and rival the chicken industry.
Although he had plans drawn up for a plant in a remote area of northern Ontario, it was still years away from being built.
In the meantime, Galbraith’s obligations under the buy-back deals had mushroomed to more than $350 million.
Had investors been found to cover that amount, jurors were told, the commitment over the next decade would have been more than $3 billion.
Despite bringing in $42 million in the last four years, Galbraith also went personally bankrupt after the collapse of the company. As a result, there was no hope of restitution for victims.
“There is no money at the end of the rainbow to give back to these folks,” Robinson said.
After ignoring pointed advice from judges and representing himself at the complicated trial, Galbraith finally hired a lawyer for the sentencing.
David North stressed Galbraith didn’t live a lavish lifestyle or sock away money, redistributing it instead to other investors. Farmers who got in on the deal early actually made money.
Arguing for a sentence of less than six years, he also said Galbraith has lost up to 40 pounds since going into custody following his conviction.
“It would be a crushing sentence for someone who is quickly becoming an old man,” North said of the prosecution’s call for nine to 12 years. “And to what end, to what end?”
Looking gaunt and worn in a dark suit hanging off his frame, Galbraith was uncharacteristically silent when given that opportunity to address Justice Gerry Taylor before the prison term was imposed.
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Homing pigeon mystery solved. According to Keeton, a mystery of pigeon released at Castor Hill and the town of Weedsport consistently took the same wrong turn when they departed. Meanwhile, birds that were released from Jersey Hill tended to head off in random directions, but with one exception: all of the birds that departed from the hill on 13 August 1969 returned home successfully having taken the correct bearing. Explaining that Keeton had already ruled out the possibility of a disturbance in the local magnetic field, Hagstrum recalls, ‘Bill asked if we geologists had an idea what might be going on at these sites’.
Several years after Keeton’s lecture Hagstrum came up with a possible solution to the problem when he read that pigeons can hear incredibly low frequency ‘infrasound’. Explaining that infrasound — which can generated by minute vibrations in the planet surface caused by waves deep in the ocean — travels for thousands of kilometers, Hagstrum wondered whether homing pigeons are listening for the distinctive low frequency rumble of their loft area to find their bearing home. In which case, birds that could not hear the infrasound signal, because the release site was shielded from it in some way, could not get their bearing and would get lost. Hagstrum decided to investigate the meteorological conditions on the days of unsuccessful releases to find out if there was something in the air that could explain the pigeons’ disorientation. In The Journal of Experimental Biology, he publishes his discovery that Keeton’s lost pigeons could not hear the infrasound signal from their home loft because it was diverted by the atmosphere.
However, to make this discovery, Hagstrum had to first reconstruct the atmospheric conditions on the days when pigeons had been released from the three locations. Having successfully installed a complex acoustics program — HARPA — with the help of USGS computer scientist Larry Baker and using accurate temperature, wind direction and speed measurements taken at local weather stations on those days, Hagstrum reconstructed the atmospheric conditions. Then, he calculated how infra sound travelled from the loft through the atmosphere, refracting through layers in the air and bouncing off the ground, to find out if Jersey Hill was shaded from the loft’s infra sound homing beacon and how the signal from the loft was channeled by the wind and local terrain to Castor Hill and Weedsport.
Amazingly, on all of the days when the birds vanished from Jersey Hill, Hagstrum could see that the loft’s infrasonic signal was guided away from the ground and high into the atmosphere: the birds could not pick it up. However, on 13 August 1969, the atmospheric conditions were perfect and this time the infrasonic signal was guided directly to the Jersey Hill site. And when he calculated the paths that the loft’s infrasonic signal traveled to Castor Hill and Weedsport they also explained why the birds consistently took the wrong bearing. The terrain and winds had diverted the infra sound so that it approached the release site from the wrong direction, sending the birds off on the wrong bearing.
Explaining that the birds must use the loft’s infrasonic homing beacon to get their bearing before setting the direction for their return flight according to their sun compass, Hagstrum says, ‘I am a bit surprised that after 36 years I finally answered Bill Keeton’s question to the Cornell Geology Department’, adding that he is particularly pleased that he was able to use Keeton’s own data to solve the pigeon mystery.
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Rare pigeon heist in Abbotsford
Police have charged a 29-year-old Abbotsford man with stealing some rare pigeons, and they believe he may be part of a ring responsible for numerous livestock and fowl thefts in the Fraser Valley.
William James Balice was arrested on Canada Day after 365 birds, mostly pigeons, were reported stolen June 28 from a farm in the 2700 block of Lefeuvre Road. He has been charged with possession of stolen property and break and enter.
Abbotsford Police Const. Ian MacDonald said the stolen purebred pigeons are highly sought-after by the bird-show community and sell for $60 to $100 per bird. The breeds taken included the American Roller, the Muffed Tumbler, the West of England Tumbler and Helmet.
Balice was allegedly found in possession of some of the birds, and had listed them for sale on craigslist.
MacDonald said the rarity of the pigeons made them easy to identify, but tracking down the other missing animals has been more difficult.
Abbotsford Police created a position, called LEO (livestock enforcement officer), to deal specifically with the thefts of chickens, pigeons, ducks, goats and sheep.
The incidents began last fall. Two Abbotsford sites were hit in November and February, resulting in the heist of 5,300 pigeons that are sold as meat — known as squab – for $4 to $10 each.
Also this year, close to 20 Boer goats were taken from a property on Downes Road, and hundreds of chickens were stolen from two Abbotsford farms at the end of May.
In Langley, the thefts included 22 lambs, six ducks and 65 chickens from three properties in March. One of those farms was also targeted in December, when 17 ducks were taken.
A farm in Chilliwack was hit in November, when seven pregnant goats were stolen. Six of them were later located on a property in Langley. At the time, Chilliwack RCMP estimated that 60 goats had been swiped from the community.
Balice next appears in Abbotsford provincial court on Friday on the charges related to the pigeon heist. He is also scheduled to plead guilty that day to a previous charge (from March 18) of driving while prohibited.
Balice is also among a group of five charged with break and enter, theft and trespassing in Maple Ridge on March 29, and is next due in Port Coquitlam provincial court on July 13.
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Darwin right proved by pigeon genomes. Humans have shaped the domestic pigeon into hundreds of breeds of various shapes, colours and attributes — a diversity that captivated Charles Darwin, who even conducted breeding experiments on his own pigeons. Now, a number of domestic and feral pigeon genomes have been sequenced for the first time, giving scientists a resource for studying the genetics of how these traits evolved.
The study, published online today in Science1, gives insight into the genetics of both ‘fancy’ domestic breeds and plain street pigeons and supports their common origin from the wild rock dove (Columba livia). “We go from having virtually no genetic or genomic resources available for the pigeon to being able to map regions associated with particular traits,” says team member Michael Shapiro, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
All in the family
The Utah team, along with Jun Wang and colleagues at BGI-Shenzhen in China and scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, sequenced a complete ‘reference’ genome from a breed called the Danish tumbler. The researchers also sequenced the pigeon genomes of 36 different fancy breeds and of two feral birds from different regions of the US.
The study fills in knowledge about the relationships between breeds, many of which are centuries old with origins in the Middle East. Darwin argued that all domestic pigeon breeds descended from the wild rock dove. Shapiro says this study puts data behind that argument, as all the breeds sequenced are more similar genetically to one another than to another, closely related, species of pigeon, C. rupestris. It also found that street pigeons are genetically similar to racing homing pigeons, which frequently escape into the wild.
Ornament and utility
One question is whether similar traits in different breeds, such as flouncy leg feathers or short beaks, are caused by the same genetic mutations. The researchers analysed head crests, feathers growing in the reverse direction to normal that vary from short tufts to outrageous manes that envelop the head. Breeding studies by pigeon fanciers suggested that head crests were caused by a simple recessive mutation. Using software developed for finding genes that underlie human diseases, the researchers analysed crested and uncrested breeds, and discovered a mutation in a gene that matched the crests in all cases. The results suggest that the mutation evolved just once in the species.
Head crests, Shapiro said, are “one of many traits that we see in domestic pigeons that have a correlate in lots of natural species of birds,” where they are used in courtship and displays of aggression. Further research will be able to discover whether the same gene is involved in creating crests in other species. In similar fashion, Shapiro says, scientists can use pigeon genetics to study the emergence of more complex traits.
Leif Andersson, who studies domestic animal genetics at Uppsala University in Sweden, says that the work addresses a gap in our knowledge about pigeons, which has lagged behind that of chickens, pigs and dogs. Domesticated species are important tools for comparative genomics, with traits honed by humans over thousands of years. “The different domestic animals complement each other,” he says, “because they’ve been selected for different purposes.”
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