Racing pigeons can give a person purpose when they need it most, Dandenong Racing Pigeon Club members Chris McDonald and Keith Flentjar tell CASEY NEILL.
NO ONE knows exactly how racing pigeons make their way home.
“They’ve done all the experiments and it’s got something to do with the earth’s magnetism, their homing instinct,” Dandenong Racing Pigeon Club president Keith Flentjar said.
“Some birds will fly in the night.
“The races that affect them is if we have bad electrical storms. That affects their radar.
“They’ve done all these tests and they don’t really know.
“You’ve sort of got to break them in.
“When they’ve first hatched, you let them out around the loft and they get themselves home through instinct.
“After that they’re home for life.
“I’ve had them come home two years later.
“Once they’re homed to your loft they’re there for life.
“They’ll have a perch in their loft and it doesn’t matter what pigeon’s on that perch, they’ll knock them off.”
DRPC secretary Chris McDonald said flyers slowly increased the distance their birds flew.
“It’s a learning thing as well. We don’t just take them 600 mile and let them go,” he said.
Keith said the next race was from Wycheproof, 260 kilometres away.
“Our next race point’s Ouyen, then we go to Mildura, Coombah, Fowler’s Gap – that’s 500 miles – and Tibooburra is usually our 600,” he said.
“The truck will take the birds up to one of these race points.
“At a predetermined time they’re let go and they come back, then it’s the quickest velocity from when they’re released to when they get home.”
Flyers put a life ring on each bird when they’re about seven days old.
“You slide them over their toes,” Keith said.
The small band contains a serial number and contact details.
When the bird races, another band is added to their other leg.
“That’s recorded against the pigeon’s life ring number,” Keith said.
“When the bird comes home, you take that rubber off the pigeon’s leg and it goes into a pigeon clock.
“When it comes home you drop the rubber in that hole and then you turn the key.
“On the paper it prints the time.
“That’s put into the computer and it gives the pigeon’s velocity.
“In the past five years, electronic timers have come in.
“The new style is electronic ones, where on the other leg to the life ring they have a rubber ring with a chip.
“They sweep the chip across here (a barcode scanner-like device) and then that records the pigeon.
“At the pigeon flyer’s loft, he’s got what’s called an antenna. The pigeon flies in and lands on the antenna and it goes ‘bip’ and records the time.”
The club races every Saturday from June to November.
“We always have trouble with the weather, usually in the early races,” Keith said.
“And then we get concerned with the heat as we go further inland.
“Two years ago we had to stop races because it was 40 degrees.
“We’ve got to look after our pigeons.
“Heat is always a concern once we start to go inland so we finish the races about mid-October just so we can try and beat the heat.
“Every year it just seems to be getting hotter and hotter.”
Keith said one of his birds finished third in a 600-mile Tibooburra race in 10 hours and 15 minutes.
“That’s nearly 900 kilometres,” he said.
“There have been some other quicker races. There was a Cobar race that was four hours. That’s 400 miles, doing 100mph.
“The wind is the dominant factor. They fly 70kmh with no wind.
“It it’s a tail wind and it’s a 20km wind then they’ll find 90kmh. That’s 2000 metres per minute.
“If it’s a headwind, they drop down to 50kmh.
“They do some remarkable feats.”
Don’t they get tired?
“Not the good ones,” Keith said.
“There are pigeons that are sprint pigeons. There are middle-distance pigeons and there are long-distance pigeons.
“You can’t win the Melbourne Cup with a sprinter and pigeons are the same.
“Once they’re sprinters they’re always sprinters.
“Blokes will add a sprinter pigeon into the long-distance pigeons and try and give them a bit more speed.
“Long-distance pigeons, they fly at the same speed day-in, day-out.
“If they go to a 100 mile race and a sprinter and a staying pigeon went out together, they start off together and then a sprinter just edges away.
“It’s in them to go that bit quicker.
“When you go to a long-distance race and you’ve got a sprinter in there and a long-distance pigeon, he’ll be flying at 1000 metres and then the sprinter starts dropping off.
“Sprinting pigeons, when they go to a race point at say 400 miles, they know that they’re past their distance. I honestly believe that.
“There could be quite a lot of losses in those races because the pigeons just seem to know that they can’t make it home.”
Chris said flyers “have sprinters for the shorter races and they do their job, and they’ve always got their staying pigeons in the loft”.
“As the season goes on they’re racing and the sprinters are back in the loft for next year,” he said.
Keith said the sprinting pigeons were built like human sprinters, with strong bodies because they need power.
“The long-distance pigeons are smaller and more streamline so they can fly for a lot longer hours into any wind conditions,” he said.
“Their make-up body-wise is entirely different.”
He said pigeons for all distances originated from rock pigeons in England that were domesticated.
“They started off sending them to 100 mile,” Keith said.
“Say they sent 20 but five only might have got home so those five pigeons, they produced their next lot of pigeons that would fly 150 mile.
“It took them a number of years to get long-distance pigeons but they were out of these same pigeons to start off with.
“They kept breeding off the ones that kept coming home, and that helped to introduce pigeons that could go to 500 or 600 miles.”
Pigeons went behind enemy lines in Germany during the war, Keith said.
“Some of the pigeons have got the Victoria Cross. In England they saved a lot of lives,” he said.
“I know there was one part of the war where they couldn’t use any Morse code or anything, and a lot of the fliers had a pigeon pocket and had a pigeon in the pocket and they could send the messages out with the pigeons.
“There’s another one where they had two pigeons in a harness and if one got shot, the other pigeon could still fly on.
“The Germans and that were shooting the pigeons because they knew what was going on.”
He said famous pigeon flyers included the Queen of England, former boxer Mike Tyson, former Australian cricketer Bill Lawrie and movie star Clint Eastwood.
“In Europe, where it’s been established for years, they can make quite a good living out of it,” Keith said.
“In Belgium and that they fly for a lot of money.
“Here, the flier puts in a few dollars a week for prize money.
“You might win a few hundred dollars over the year. It pays for their food.”
Chris, from Endeavour Hills, said his son got him interested in the sport.
“He started racing pigeons and he left home and I kept going,” he said.
He’s been a DRPC member since 1986.
“You come down to the club and you’ve got 30 or 40 blokes here all anxious to hear what time who’s clocked,” he said.
“It’s something a lot of men do when they get a bit older and they can’t play footy and cricket.”
Keith, who lives in Hallam, used to show parrots when he was a kid.
“Then I went into racing greyhounds. Then my wife’s brother, he was in pigeons,” he said.
“I took an interest in it.
“It’s a disease. You can’t get it out of your blood once you start.
“I’ve always been bird-minded, I suppose.
“If I go anywhere to a zoo I only look at all the birds.”
He’s been with DRPC since 2000.
“That many people die, who worked in an office all these years and then they retire and usually in a couple of years, yibbida yibbida they’re no longer with us,” he said.
“When you retire you’ve got to have something to make you get out of bed.
“If you’ve got to go out and clean out the loft and feed them and water them …
“It’s not a big chore. It’s enjoyable.”
Keith gently lifted a placid pigeon from a small, wooden travel box.
“This is a pigeon I raced last year,” he said, gently cupping Chrystal in his hands.
“It finished up being bird of the year in the federation.
“This pigeon I class as a middle-distance pigeon because she won the first race was 240 mile and the last race was 400 mile.
“She raced four times. She was first club and first federation Kaniva, which is 390 miles.
“She went to the breeder’s plate. She finished 10th in that.
“Then she went to the next race, she was third in the club and 13th in the federation from Murray Bridge.
“Then she won the club and was first federation from Morgan, 680km, and she ended up being bird of the year in our federation.
“It’s not often that one pigeon wins two ‘feds’.”
The two-year-old is now in the breeding box.
“In the genetic powers, the mother passes her genes onto her sons and the father passes his genes onto his daughters,” he said.
The birds can live to about 12 or 14 years of age, but most only race until they’re three.
“The biggest problem for us in race season is the predators,” Keith said.
“In Europe they can race them to five, six, seven year old.
“If we can get one into the third year they’ve done well.
“It seems to be once they get to three year old you run the gauntlet, and those type of pigeons generally want to fly on their own.
“Pigeons are like sheep, they fly in a mob together for protection.
“It’s only probably in the last 30 or 40 mile that the winners – there might be five or six pigeons – they start to break towards home.
“The wind is the dominant factor of pigeon racing.
“If it’s a northerly wind it will favour people at Frankston. If it’s a north-westerly wind it favours people at Endeavour Hills.”
Chris said: “There is a bit of fluking in it.”
Keith continued: “It gets down to split seconds.”
“Generally in the first batch of pigeons there’s four or five. Those five pigeons will be within a metre of each other depending on where they live.”
The club was established about 1969 and its rooms are at Power Reserve, Doveton.
It’s part of a 115-flyer federation that spans from Rosebud to Croydon.
It has about 32 members, and hosted Casey councillor Wayne Smith at its Power Reserve headquarters on Friday 24 June.
DRPC stalwart Joe Phillips recently donated a truck and bird baskets worth about $300,000 to give back to the sport that’s given him enjoyment for 52 years.
During the visit, secretary Chris McDonald asked Cr Smith to consider allocating council funding for a base outside the shed to accommodate the truck and shelter overhead to protect the pigeons from rain.
