Fleet of Feather : Hazards Are Many for Home-Bound Racing Pigeons

LAGUNA NIGUEL —  Bob Wright anxiously scanned the bright blue sky above his home. “They should be here but they’re not,” he lamented, glancing at the time--10:30 a.m.

A few minutes later his face broke into a broad smile as two gray pigeons appeared through the scattered clouds, then tucked back their wing tips and dived to their loft in Wright’s back yard.

Less than four hours earlier last Saturday, these birds had been among about 7,000 others that were released simultaneously in a whirlwind of flapping wings from their traveling crates into the clear morning sky of Delano, in northern Kern County.

It was the first official race for these young birds, all born this year, after many weeks of test flights and careful conditioning by handlers living in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Since Wright’s house is at the end of the course, the 30 birds he and his father, Lewis, were racing that day had the greatest distance to fly, 181 miles. Along the way they would have to avoid wing-breaking utility wires, hungry hawks and buffeting crosswinds through the mountain passes in their single-minded pursuit of home.

“When I see those birds come I feel as elated as one could feel about anything in life,” said Wright, one of the 80 or so homing pigeon racers in Orange County.

Enthusiasts of the sport say it is becoming increasingly difficult to practice in Southern California, what with the tiny lot sizes of new subdivisions, traffic-clogged streets that make pigeon hauling a chore and troublesome city ordinances governing bird-keeping.

Hobbyists complain that those ordinances, which sometimes outlaw the keeping of pigeons in yards, don’t distinguish between a racing pigeon, which lives in a loft, and its ragtag cousin, which sullies ocean piers and car roofs.

But the committed racers, many of whom have been working with homing pigeons since childhood, continue to push on, still filled with wonder that pigeons can make their way home from distant places.

In marathons, young birds are released as far as 400 miles north in Woodland, near Sacramento, while older and more experienced racers can fly home in a day from as far as Oregon.

The winner is the bird that flies at the greatest speed in yards per minute, calculated by the distance to his loft divided by the flying time. The night before a race, members of local pigeon racing clubs meet to synchronize their computerized clocks.

When a bird arrives at its loft, it has not finished the race until it walks into a trap where a special leg band is removed by the handler and put into his clock, which then records the arrival time.

Pigeons fly 40 to 45 m.p.h. on the average, and up to 70 m.p.h. with a stiff tail wind.

Earl and Bonnie B. Wenzel of Garden Grove, who have been flying pigeons for 27 years in Orange County, said they have noticed that in recent years the sport has become increasingly competitive.

“Now it is hard work,” Bonnie Wenzel said, noting that many handlers now rise at 5 a.m. each morning to drive their caged birds 40 to 60 miles over pre-rush hour freeways for a training flight home.

But keeping birds fit with exercise, vitamins and special feed and scrubbing their lofts clean every day may not be enough.

“It isn’t strength or stamina, it is motivation that makes a pigeon fly,” contends Earl Wenzel. He said he favors hens for longer flights because they are more anxious to get home to eggs or baby birds.

Wright of Laguna Niguel also uses bird psychology.

“Birds race for food, water, territory and sex,” he said. Like most other handlers, Wright races his birds on empty stomachs, both to make them lighter, and thus faster, and to give them greater incentive to reach the home seed trough.

Moreover, Wright said he “teases” racing hens by mating several of them to the same cock. Jealousy for that cock, he said, makes the hens want to beat one another to the nest.

Not all arrive without mishap. Wright said this year more than half of his novice pigeons failed to return home during trial flights. Wright said he believes the recent heat wave took its toll on lost birds that became too exhausted to get back on course.

Pigeon racers say that last year sun spots confused the birds, giving more credence to the theory that the birds somehow use the alignment of the sun to orient their flight home.

Wright said he can’t always predict how young birds will fare as racers. He cast a dark look Saturday at one beautiful bird he thought would surge ahead of the pack because it had secured the top perch in the loft coveted by the others. But he fell behind in the race.

The laggard bird would have other chances, since the young pigeons are scheduled to race for eight more weekends.

“The first few times they fly it is a crap shoot,” Wright noted.

Bugsy Szymanek, racing secretary for the Orange Belt Homing Pigeon Assn., the organization overseeing the six pigeon racing clubs in Orange County, said that although handlers breed their pigeons to be winners, any bird might surprise you.

“One guy may buy a pigeon for $5,000 and another can go to the chicken market and buy one for $2 and have a winner,” he said.

His favorite bird, he said, is a three-time champion named Malutka, meaning “tiny one” in Polish, because “as a young bird she was very small and scrawny looking. I thought she would be just one of those losers. But she proved me wrong.”

Homing pigeons have a long history of association with man. They were used extensively as message carriers before the invention of the telegraph and shuttled information across enemy lines for the Allies during World War II. In the United States recently, winning the pigeon races has become more lucrative with the influx of immigrants from Asia, where betting on the races is popular, said Dan Hinds, who operates a business trucking pigeons to races. Hinds said some immigrants from Taiwan will pay thousands of dollars for a champion they plan to breed.

Also, Hinds said, a growing number of Southern California pigeon races offer prize money, chief among them the Snowbird Classic in November, a 400-mile race from Marysville, north of Sacramento, to the San Fernando Valley, which has cash prizes totaling more than $400,000.

But Szymanek said Orange County pigeon owners say they race mostly for trophies and certificates. And for Szymanek, it is also a hobby he can share with his three children.

Also, he finds the excitement intoxicating. The night before a race, Szymanek said, owners bring their pigeons to a central point for loading onto a truck. “Then we go home and have a rough or easy night. Sometimes you work yourself up and can’t sleep because your adrenaline is so high.”

On Saturday morning, Wright received a call from a fellow club member telling him that the first birds had landed at lofts in the San Fernando Valley at 9 a.m.

Wright said while his birds would be on an equal footing with other birds as they flew through the San Joaquin Valley, that would change after the birds came through Gorman Pass and dropped into the San Fernando Valley, where they would begin to land at their respective lofts.

Pigeons are a gregarious lot that like to fly in groups, Wright said, and each time a group would break away to return to their home lofts, his birds would have to resist the urge to follow. They must stay on their route home much longer without letting up speed.

Other young birds that morning had overshot their own lofts and continued to Wright’s home. Six of the hapless birds, after circling the strange loft, backtracked to find their own. But one decided to fly on in and accept Wright’s hospitality. The club identification on the bird’s band said it belonged to the Quaker City Club from Whittier.

As Wright waited for his last birds to return, two hawks circled high above, temporarily scaring away some pigeons that approached.

Later in the afternoon Wright learned that the first bird to land in his loft, arriving at 10:39 a.m., placed third in Wright’s club and 14th out of the 700 birds racing from Orange County.

To Wright’s relief, all of his birds arrived home safely.

“They can have Monday off to loaf and then it is back to work,” he said.