Racehorses of the sky

It’s 7 on a cool spring morning in the tiny Eastern Sierra town of Big Pine. Hundreds of racing pigeons, their constant cooing shattering the otherwise still air, are packed inside trucks that sit in a parking lot.

At precisely 7:15 a.m. a switch is flipped, and the sides of the trucks burst open. The sleepy mountain enclave is suddenly filled with the raucous din of more than 1,700 birds flapping wildly.

“You don’t want to get in their way,” says Bill Migliaccio, a stocky, slightly grizzled pigeon racer from Perris. “They’ll knock you down. If you’re near the doors when they open, you should just hit the dirt.”

In minutes, the pigeons are gone, and the parking lot is again peaceful.

The birds will cover 200 miles at speeds of up to 75 mph during the one-way race as they wing their way to their respective homes. Migliaccio paces, checks the sky constantly and won’t relax until his birds return to Perris. Some, he knows, may not make it, falling prey to a hawk or getting tangled in power lines along the way.

Migliaccio, who has been racing homing pigeons for more than 20 years, admits somewhat sheepishly that he doesn’t name his birds anymore. “It makes it too hard when they don’t come back,” he says.

Homing pigeons have a long and prestigious history that dates to 12th century Baghdad when the birds delivered messages to post offices. Pigeons are credited with helping win battles in World War II when the Allies, worried about radio transmissions being intercepted, used the birds to carry battlefield messages. One American homing pigeon named G.I. Joe was awarded the British Dickin Medal for bravery after promptly delivering a message that helped save the lives of more than 1,000 British soldiers.

Today the American Racing Pigeon Union claims 10,000 members and sells a million bird bands every year. In Taiwan and South Africa, pigeon racing is big business, with bird owners competing for $1-million purses. But in most races, winners earn only bragging rights.

A deep connection

For some owners, the tight personal bond with the birds seems to overshadow the competitive edge. Pigeon racers can rattle off the lineage of each of their birds as well as the superstars of the sport. They know, for example, that the best birds come from Belgium. They obsess over food supplements and fuss over favorite birds as if they’re members of the family. Handlers point proudly to the celebrities who race birds, such as NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.

Training pigeons, dubbed the racehorses of the sky, isn’t cheap. Average birds can be had for a pittance, but eggs from winning bloodlines and top racers generally run hundreds of dollars. A few years back a pedigreed bird sold for more than $200,000 in Europe. But some longtime racers pass along birds and eggs for free to newcomers.

Building and outfitting a basic coop, or loft, runs around $500. Most lofts look like wooden tool sheds with wire-grill fronts and an overhanging awning. Inside, the back wall is lined with dozens of cubbyholes that serve as perches and nesting spots for the birds.

Pigeons eat birdseed, but serious homing racers boost their birds’ diet with electrolytes, potassium and vitamin supplements.

And then there’s endless hours of careful training.

Martha Delgado, also of Perris, spends up to five hours a day exercising her pigeons. On a recent morning, she squints skyward as a large flock makes wide circles over her spacious backyard. Behind her are lofts with walls of tidy wooden warrens where her 180 birds have been trained to land.

Delgado, 49, is training avian athletes, a far cry from the grimy pigeons found in urban areas. She became interested in racing pigeons through her husband about five years ago. Though the two eventually parted, she was hooked.

Twice a day she grabs some of the birds and tosses them out of the loft for exercise and to build the endurance they’ll need to complete races that can cover more than 500 miles in a day.

Twenty birds, which have been exercising for 45 minutes, are beginning to return, making broad, swooping passes, dipping slightly when they pass the biggest loft. But none of them land.

The birds, which seem nervous with a visitor present, pull up into the sky and hover.

“They are thinking about landing,” says Delgado. “But they’re not quite sure. They’re still pretty young, but they’re learning.”

Delgado keeps young birds, older birds and breeding stock, including some that are pure white. (These “doves,” released at weddings and special events, are really pigeons).

The next time the birds pass, they start landing -- first one, then three and within a few minutes all are back. Most scurry inside the loft for a drink, but a few stand on the awning, panting.

Delgado spends nearly every day exercising, training and feeding her birds, followed by cleaning the lofts. It’s an orderly regimen that often means missing vacations or family events.

“This is not a hobby,” says Migliaccio. “It is not even a lifestyle. It’s an addiction. And if you’ve got it, you love it.”

Logging flight times

Migliaccio and Delgado are members of the Y2K Racing Pigeon Club, which enrolled 256 birds in the Big Pine event. The race, like all spring races, is for “old birds,” pigeons that are at least a year old. Getting birds to the race begins the morning before, at Migliaccio’s garage, which serves as a clubhouse where Y2K members meet each Saturday. Members come loaded with crates of cooing birds. Each pigeon is logged into a computer, then transferred to a truck that takes them to the race.

Within a few hours after release, the birds begin to arrive at their home lofts. As the returning birds push their way through a door flap, an electronic chip affixed to their legs records their flight times, which are transmitted to a central computer. The winner is determined not when a bird crosses a finish line, but by measuring its average speed -- in yards per minute. Competitors learn their birds’ rank when times are posted the next day.

As pigeon racers fret about breeding birds with superior homing instincts, scientists are beginning to unravel the mystery of how this instinct works. Basically, it’s the same way that other birds, even tiny hummingbirds, manage to migrate thousands of miles between summer breeding grounds in Colorado and winter homes in South America.

According to Kimball Garrett, the ornithology collections manager of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the migratory instinct is as old as the stars, which are exactly what the birds rely upon.

“The most promising research going on has to do with celestial navigation,” says Garrett. “Birds can figure out their position on the globe through celestial patterns. It’s the same way that sailors have navigated through the position of the sun and the stars for centuries.”

One of the most intriguing studies of avian celestial navigation is being conducted by Stephen Emlen, a professor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y. Emlen found that when he placed birds in a planetarium-like setting, the birds hopped in different directions, depending on which way the star patterns were manipulated. In short, the birds appear to navigate based on the celestial patterns they see.

So what happens when birds can’t see the stars? Most birds have backup systems. David Bonter, a researcher and leader of Project Feeder Watch at the Cornell Lab, says: “For any species, there are a variety of navigational aids. There is a popular idea that birds learn from older birds which way to go. But for the most part this is not true.”

Research also suggests that homing pigeons can detect and navigate from the Earth’s magnetic fields. Pigeons’ beaks, scientists believe, contain magnetic particles. In other words, birds have tiny built-in compasses, which they recalibrate daily. When metal coils that disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field are attached to the necks of birds, they fly in the wrong direction. Without the coils, the birds fly home.

“The coils reverse the magnetic fields, and the birds take a different route home,” explains Bonter. “It reverses their sense of direction. Pigeons don’t fly in a straight line, they fly in an arc. So if their arc should have gone right, they’d reverse and go to the left.”

Softening the loss

The birds make it home eventually, with help from yet another backup system: sight and sound. That’s why Delgado and other racers spend months training their birds in the skies around their lofts to recognize local landmarks. It’s also why pigeons rarely race when it’s cloudy; they need to see where they’re going.

“You can lose up to half of your birds if they are released when it’s overcast,” Delgado says sadly. “That really hurts.”

She comes to terms with the losses, comforted by the link she has with her birds that starts with mere hatchlings.

“You breed them, raise them, train them and then race them,” she says, gazing into the loft of cooing birds. “They are so smart.”

Most mornings, before she heads to her state job as an economic analyst, Delgado crates up some of the birds and drives them far outside of town.

“Sometimes they make it back before I do,” she laughs. “I can be driving home and see them flying above me.”

Sharon Liveten is a freelance writer based in North Hollywood.