Sometimes incompirehensible (29-10-25)
Sometimes incomprehensible
Still remember Saturday 19 July? What a pesky races that day with unfortunately the necessary losses. The weather was quite pleasant, but the wind was South East.
Cmpetitions lasted far too long and the losses were large.
I have a pretty good accounting and it shows that with a STRONG SE wind it rarely ends well. Now there are even fanciers who have resolved never to basket with that wind again.
It is now an established fact that pigeons deviate to the west.
Is the sum, that curvature to the west plus southeast wind perhaps too much?
ALSO
What is also difficult to grasp? The sometimes enormous differences with regard to losses between one fancier and another and one village and a village close to it.
Tossing youngsters five times in the same place and losing a mass the sixth time? Is another thing.
And then that East Braband guy.
Early in the morning he trained eleven late youngsters at 3 km. from home. Not one came home the same day.
I once caught a pigeon from a Belgian, who lived 150 kms from me. As often happens, she did not leave. I reported the pigeon, as it should be. 'If the 5 km one is too stupid to go home, I can't do anything with it' were the not too sympathetic words of the owner.
I entered him for a training pigeon for a race from Quievrain.
He arrived with mine! Not being able to find the way from 5 km but effortlessly from 150 km without any prior direction? Inexplicable.
ALSO
Do you know what's also crazy? That in many races, especially in abnormal course, you often get two or more pigeons home at the same time. Nothing for a long time, then 2 or 3 pigeons at the same time, nothing for a while and then a few together again. Did they find each other along the way? Can those loft mates distinguish themselves from others? A mystery to me.
ROOF BIRDS
Two pairs of wild wood pigeons have been in my yard for several years. Not those slender shiny birds as I knew them from the past, but fat lazy lamb bags with large pies of stinking manure.
Why did birds of prey not even look at them? Do they like racing pigeons better?
FERTILIZATION
There are also strange situations with regard to fertilization. Once I had two cocks that (for a year) no good eggs.
They had been too good to get rid of them. To my amazement, they did fertilize again the following year. Just skipped a year. Because of less fitness? It is reminiscent of Klak. He had a very old cock, who seemed to be worn out. But he still fertilized excellently.
Two of his sons no longer fertilized while the vitality radiated from them. Isn’t it Unbelievable?
OUT OF FLOCK
It is also strange that in large competitions, also provincial and even national, first prizes are won by pigeons that came out of a flock of birds that passed.
Could be if the lofts were in line with each other, but that is of course not the case. If you then study the results, there are no pigeons right behind the winner as you would expect. It is inevitable that the pigeons that accompanied the winner were wrong.' Wrong', do almost all those pigeons that you see in large numbers on racing days. Is only the pigeon that leads the pack right? Herd animals as they are, they stayed together for too long. That herd spirit must be broken. And the sooner they leave the flock, the less the curvature they make and the earlier their place on the result sheet. The herd spirit can be broken by training individually (pigeon by pigeon), some believe.
An assumption that is difficult to prove.
READING RESULTS
I say it more often, reading results is an art that not everyone masters. Many are misled by coming across the same name over and over again. The number of participants in a competition is also carelessly ignored.
Take the result in the club named Tienverbond on 29/4. 33 fanciers had entered 93 yearlings.
A competition of only 93 pigeons is indeed little.
But fanciers who only enter an average of 3 pigeons, all the best of course, shows stiff competition.
There are examples where 5 fanciers together enter 5 times as many pigeons as those 33. A 1st prize winner against 500 pigeons is estimated higher than a winner against 93 pigeons. It also has a greater commercial value. But...
If those 500 pigeons were entered by about 7 fanciers and those 93 by 33, then I would prefer the winner of those 93 pigeons.
In my youth I had my 'Goede Duivin'. He has brought in a lot of money, mainly thanks to my 'pigeon accounting'. She taught me that she was different from most.
She won even at an age of 5 years when taking care of a youngster of at least 16 days and without a partner. Racing a hen for five years was quite common at the time. You should try it now.
EASTERNERS
Buyers from the Far East love winners. Who doesn't, by the way?
Sometimes questions reach me from there.
But I never experienced that someone asked how many fanciers had participated in a certain competition. Or how the wind 'was'.
Knowing that is essential. You never heard a potential buyer ask under what weather conditions a National race was achieved.
Take one of the national races from Bourges this year (2025). With all due respect to the winner, but with that heavy southwesterly wind, he could hardly fall differently than there, in the far northeast. But let's not whine. That is pigeon sport. The most unfair of all sports with more than in other sports 'today a smile and tomorrow a tear'.