The pigeon walked the last lap home

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33776, 24 February 1975, Page 13

The pigeon walked the last lap home

(Bv John Clare in the *‘Objerver”.)

Reporters of one of Britain’s most popular and mysterious sports gathered in’Budapest recently for the 14th International Pigeon Olympiad. Together with fanciers from 25 other countries, they are there to watch the judging of more than 300 birds. Each of them, to qualify, must have raced at least 1000 miles with distinction, making the Olympiad, as one fancier put it, rather like a beauty contest for four-minute milers. The pigeon’s head, say the rules, must be convex, either round or slightly flattened on top, the back of the head deep, the forehead developed both in width and in height. The beak must be in proportion. the nose wattle dry and white (but not developed exaggeratedly), the eye well set in and shining brightly, and the gullet as powerful as possible.

The body as a whole must be firm, well-balanced, of aerodynamic shape, and it would take half-a-column to describe the Olympic requirements of a wing, never mind the furcula, the tail, the thighs and the feet. There are about 250,000 active fanciers in Britain, owning some 10 million birds. Although the financial rewards are small, much personal honour is held to be at stake, so competition is fierce and controversy heated. Last week a fancier was suspended for life for ungentlemanly conduct, by no means a rare occurrence.

The sport’s administration and rules have achieved an almost Byzantine complexity much of it designed to make cheating impossible in timing the birds home. The rule of “improbable velocity,” for example, has been developed to allow a bird to be disqualified without actually imposing a stain on its owner's character. As for controversy, the hottest has revolved for nearly a decade around something called the Eyesign Theory, a sort of optical palmistry, whose exponents assert that all a pigeon’s qualities are to be found in the colour and layout of its eye. So deep is the arguement that “Racing Pigeon,” the sports weekly bible, has yet to take an editorial stand. >

Four of the 24 pigeons Britain has sent to Budapest this year come from the loft of Mr Herb Webley, a 60-year-old ex-miner from Abergavenny who retired 10 year's ago with pneumoconiosis after 37 years underground. He reckons that the loneliness of life underground prepares a man for the solitude of working with his birds and indeed gives him a taste for it. Miners have always been the sport’s most fervent fans.

“Pigeons,” Mr Webley says softly, “I think they are next in flesh and intelligence to human beings. I’ve cried as much as a little girl at the courage of them. I’ve seen the youngsters at the end of a race when the wind has been strong walk the last 50 yards to my loft. They’ve got to think a lot of you to come home all those distances, haven’t they?”

Mr Webley believes that the secret of keeping pigeons happy is to form a close assocation with them. “You’ve got to speak to

them so they know your voice,” he says. “Always keep calm, never get excited or make unnecessary movements. You’ve got to be good, you see; one bad action and you’ve had it. If you pinch his leg when you’re getting the rubber ring off, you’ve made an enemy for life.”

Mr Webley began winning prizes with his birds when he was 15. Now, he says, he has developed a breed of his own based on the judicious crossing of recessive and dominant features. (He cares nothing, incidentally, for Eyesign, recommending the other end, the droppings, for study.) “A racing pigeon,” Mr Webley says, “has to have an inbred fear of the dark and the unknown. A dominant pigeon, because he isn’t afraid of anything, won’t hurry home.” How to persuade a pigeon to hurry home at 60 m.p.h. or more (races vary in length from 80 miles to more than 1000 miles) is something that exercises the ingenuity of fanciers everywhere. Fiendish Continentals are known to exploit the bird’s monogamous instinct by inducing it to believe its mate is about to be seduced by another — a bachelor bird is installed in the next cage. But this is not regarded as British, and the furthest Mr Webley will go is to insert a worm into an egg before a race to make the parent bird think it is about to hatch.

' Not the least mysterious .part of the whole business is ihow the birds find their way jhome. Partly, it seems, they navigate by the sun, partly ,by their own internal com|pass. The long-distance (record is still held by a pigeon that belonged to the first Duke of Wellington. It flew 5500 miles in 55 days from an island off the West Coast of Africa and dropped dead a mile from its loft at Nine Elms, Londong. That, Mr Webley says, is courage. It beats gerbils, anyway. — O.F.N.S. Copyright.