Belgian pigeons win four out of five ‘golds’

Press, 30 August 1984, Page 14

Belgian pigeons win four out of five ‘golds’

NZPA-Reuter Brussels Belgium’s pigeons are puffing out their chests in pride after winning the bird world’s equivalent of four gold medals. In the pigeon racing season now ending, Belgian entrants finished top in all but one of five international races, including the homing marathon from Barcelona in Spain. But Belgian newspapers are not cooing too loudly over such successes against bigger countries such as Britain, France, and West Germany. “It is always a good year for Belgium,” explains Andre Vancoppenolle, director of the Royal Belgian Colombophile (pigeon fanciers’) Federation. Every year lorries and trains take more than 15 million Belgian pigeons abroad to be freed at race starting points up to 1000 km from home. Belgian radio gives hourly weather data for pigeon owners before and during races. A navigational system, still largely a mystery, enables most of the 500 g birds to find their way home over

mountain, sea, power lines, and hunters’ guns. “The mystery is part of the fascination,” says Guy Barrett, an English engineer who is the first non-Belgian president of the International Colombophile Federation. “But the sun should always be shining when the birds are released.”

As well as navigating by the sun, pigeons have been found to have magnetic iron oxide crystals in their heads which researchers say may give them a magnetic map of their route.

Pigeon fanciers know that pigeons’ sex urge plays a strong part in giving racers an incentive to return home. Mr Vancoppenolle says male pigeons are often kept away from their mates for several days before an event and given a brief glimpse of them just before leaving home. Angele van Bruaene, aged 73, of Lauwe in Flanders, whose husband,Andre, entered the first prizewinner in this year’s Barcelona race, says comfortable living quarters and a good diet are essential for a pigeon to be contented.

The van Bruaenes, whose best pigeons are given names such as Merckx, after the top Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx, get up at 5.30 a.m. every day and spend two to three hours feeding 120 birds.

Top Belgian breeding pigeons may fetch up to IM francs ($35,000) from buyers as far afield as Japan, China and Taiwan.

Mr Vancoppenolle said large-scale international races are possible only in Europe where countries are close together. Cars, television, new leisure pursuits and cramped city flats have reduced the ranks of Belgian colombophiles since the 19505, but the national federation’s estimate of 100,000 is still high for a country of only 10 million people. Although selective breeding is slowly improving the standard of racing pigeons, modern communications have largely done away with the birds’ former function of transporting urgent messages.

There are exceptions, though. The Belgian federation’s magazine reported re-

cently that a United States aerospace firm, keen to beat motorway traffic jams, had started using carrier pigeons for the daily transport of computer designs of space vehicle components between two plants. Guy Barrett said pigeons were also used in some English cities such as Plymouth to ensure the quickest possible transport of blood samples to regional analysis laboratories.

Reuters news agency, whose founder Paul Julius Reuter used pigeons to relay commercial news from Brussels to Aachen in 1850, resorted briefly to pigeons in December 1979 when a correspondent, Alan Cowell, was deep in the Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) bush with Commonwealth ceasefiremonitoring forces.

With no other communications available, Cowell took along a dozen pigeons and sent them to Bulawayo with news items tied to their legs. The Belgian Army no longer has pigeons, but foreigners still need justice ministry permission to keep any under an old law to

protect military pigeons and prevent their use in espionage. At Mont-Valerien near Paris the French Army still keeps a pigeon establishment, where the transmissions director, General Alexandre Cruveille, said experiments were made with pigeon night flying and return trips and pigeons’ reactions to radar.

In a recent speech to a pigeon conference, General Cruveille called for greater collaboration with civilian pigeon owners in military exercises.

“A future war does not exclude use of carrier pigeons to establish communication links,” he said.

But Robert de Smet, pigeon correspondent for the popular Belgian newspaper, “La Derniere Heure,” said this was a romantic view and that France kept its army pigeons mainly for the sake of tradition.

“If I were in his place I would say things like that too,” said de Smet. “I would love to be paid a general’s’ salary to look after pigeons all day.”