Pigeon racers enjoys the romance of their sport

DANNY GAWLOWSKI | THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

• Pigeon Racing

• INTERESTED IN RACING PIGEONS?

  For more information on getting involved in pigeon racing, contact Jerry Guilmette at 739-5816 or Zdzislaw Chala at 671-6662.
  
  

For now, though, they have to eat.

Guilmette, 63, whistles in long and short bursts. He's trained the pigeons to return home with this call. They circle and dive and dance in the sky. Their white feathers flash against the sun as they break formation and roll toward the earth. A few swoop over an apple tree.

He shakes the food container and continues to whistle. He would coo if it would help.

Guilmette, a former beekeeper, has been racing pigeons for the past three years with good success. He and his wife, Evelyn Guilmette, operate G & G Lofts as breeders and racers, but it's more of a hobby than a full-fledged business.

As the president of the North Cascade Invitational Racing Pigeon Club, Guilmette and his group participate in a sport that dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of the years. Once a sport favored by royalty in Europe, homing pigeons were introduced to the United States in the late 1800s. Since then, homing pigeons have been raced for sport, to deliver messages, used for communication in wars, and even to collect data to determine air quality over larger cities.

Depending on whom one talks to, pigeon racing is either growing in popularity or dying out across the nation. For Guilmette's club, and several like it across the state of Washington, raising and racing pigeons is a hobby like no other.

"It's something you can't do halfway," Guilmette said. "It's not a hobby you can just pick up and then decide one day to drop it. It's a commitment."

FOR THE BIRDS

At any given time, Guilmette will have as many as 100 pigeons in his coops. That number fluctuates higher in the spring and lowers later in the season as birds drop out during racing season.

The birds are kept separated most of the year. The younger birds in training stay in one loft. The hens stay in another. The cocks stay in yet a different coop. There's a loft for breeding and a loft for rehabilitating birds injured or attacked by predators during flights. The Guilmettes' operation isn't small, but it's hardly large by most pigeon breeders' standards.

"The idea isn't how many birds you have, it's how healthy they are and what kind of condition they are in," Guilmette said. "You could have 1,000 birds, but they aren't worth anything because you just let them get run down."

Guilmette trains his birds as if they were Olympic athletes. Special meals of grains and vitamins are prepared. Sometimes tea can be slipped into their water for a caffeine boost. Sometimes they are fed a small amount of yogurt to keep their digestive track in shape. Their workouts are staggered and tapered. Stamina is built up over months of exercise and racing.

A typical week during the racing season has the birds taking part in a 50- or 60-mile workout on Monday or Tuesday and another on Wednesday, followed by a resting day on Thursday. On Friday the pigeons are basketed and readied for travel in preparation for Saturday's race. Sunday is another off day.

An average race takes several hours and might cover a few hundred miles depending on where the toss point is, but it isn't uncommon for at least a few birds to beat their owners back to the loft.

"If they don't come home or they don't win races, then we don't really have any use for them," Guilmette said. "Then we have to find another home for them."

PUNCHING THE CLOCK

In the early days of pigeon racing, racers used a wind-up clock and ankle tag system. It worked somewhat like a work clock and time card to track the speed a bird traveled across a designated distance. Owners collected their birds' ankle bracelets as they arrived at the coop and then punched the bracelet at the clock to record the time.

Everything is computerized now.

Pigeons wear electronic bands that register the rate at which a bird has travelled from one point to another. A computer tabulates all of the information. Typically, a pigeon averages a speed of about 45 miles per hour in flight.

The winner of a race is determined by how fast a bird is traveling in yards per minute over a course, so an owner like Guilmette can still come away with the top flyer despite the bird having to travel a further distance home than if its coop where in, say, Everett. That allows groups like the NCI club, of which Guilmette is a member, to compete against other groups from places like Arlington, Everett, and Seattle. The grouping of clubs is called a concourse.

"The fastest birds win," Guilmette said. "The guys down there usually have a little bit of an advantage over us because their birds don't have as far to fly. But if the wind is right, we have an advantage because their birds can over-fly their destinations. I've had birds here from Everett because they over-flew the mark that much."

Owners rarely exchange money in the races Guilmette takes part in, but the last young bird race of the year does feature a payout. This year's winner of the North Cascade Invitational Fall Classic pocketed about $2,000 after winning several of the racing categories.

Five clubs and about 40 birds took part in the race, which started in Battle Ground. It took a little more than three hours for the fastest birds to cover the 190-mile course.

"It really was a good race this year," Guilmette said.

BREEDING FOR SUCCESS

While racing is the obvious competitive aspect of raising racing pigeons, good breeding is where it all begins. Ultimately, it's also where the money is. If a pigeon isn't bred properly, its offspring won't be successful racers or desirable breeders.

"Not all pigeons will go home," Guilmette said. "What we want to do is genetically make the best pigeons for racing. We can tell by the race results just how good a pigeon can be. Now they might be a good racer, but not a good breeder."

Breeders evaluate a pigeon by its confirmation, or its pedigree, and its ability to win races. Most breeders also look for physical traits, like the musculature of its chest or certain formations of its feathers on its wings.

Others believe in a pigeon's eye signs. Because a pigeon's eyesight plays such a large role in its ability to navigate, breeders will look through a jeweler's loupe at the pigeons' eyes to exam the pupil, the iris and the circles around pupil to determine whether a bird will be a good racer or a good breeder. Many breeders debate the merits of this method, but Guilmette has had success with it.

"I use the eyes for 10 to 20 percent of my evaluation of a bird," Guilmette said. "There is something to it. There are a lot guys who believe it. And then when it comes time to breed, we put birds together based on those evaluations."

Very high-end birds can be sold for as much as $1,000 or more, and many of the more accomplished pigeons range from $300 to $700 dollars. A quality pigeon typically will sell for around $100. The record price paid for a racing pigeon was $125,000 according to the American Racing Pigeon Union. Guilmette purchased a bird from Oklahoma this year for $400.

WINTER OF LOVE

Guilmette usually begins breeding in January, keeping 25 pair in the breeding loft in individual boxes where they will nest and hopefully hatch offspring.

Larger breeders will mate birds up to three times in a season, Guilmette said, creating six offspring a pair, but he doesn't have the space for that and limits his breeding to twice a year. Keeping the gene pool clean is important for creating successful racers and breeders.

"Pigeons can mate for life unless I change that," Guilmette said. "I can separate them and put them in difference coops and mate them with different birds. We pick out the characteristics that we want and breed them based on that, but we let them pick each other naturally, too. Most of the time they do a pretty good job on their own."

Guilmette uses foot tags with different colors to designate which year a pigeon was born. Some have been known to live as long as 17 years and breed successfully for 11 or 12 of those years.

RESPONDING TO THE CRITICS

Anytime a sport involves the racing of animals, there are bound to be critics and pigeon racing is no different. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has called for the end of pigeon racing for years, and within the last year a story in Sports Illustrated has drawn the ire of the pigeon racing community for painting the sport in what Guilmette calls a bad light.

The Sports Illustrated story centered on the Vegas Classic, a large pigeon race where thousands of dollars are spent and gambled, something Guilmette insists is not true of the sport.

"What people don't understand is that the instincts and the love of these pigeons are to fly and to fly home," Guilmette said. "The people who are real negative of the racing element don't understand that."

Perhaps the biggest criticism pigeon breeders and racers face is the way older pigeons are motivated to race. One method takes the cock and the hen away from the nest while they are sitting on eggs so they will race back to their nest. Another method, called the widow method, separates paired mates after their young have been weaned, and then gives the couple a glimpse of each other the day before the race so they have a greater desire to return to the loft.

"That's what we call a love story," Guilmette said. "The last thing they see is each other. So we put the girls in a race where they get home first so they go straight to their nest, and then here comes the guy an hour later. Then they get together and we separate them again. We do that every week until the last week of the season and then we allow them to get together and have another baby."

Not everyone sees racing quite as romantically as do the breeders and racers. PETA officials recently criticized a group in Europe for attempting to stage a pigeon race for charity, and animal hoarding by breeders is always a concern. A letter to the organizers of the planned charity event, written by PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk, said pigeon racing takes advantage of a pigeon's intelligence and turns free-roaming birds into caged ones, with no choices in their lives.

"Once profit is introduced into the human-animal bond, all manner of nastiness can occur," Newkirk wrote in a letter found on PETA Europe's Web site. "Including dirty and barren living conditions when the animals are not racing, selling life-bonded partners away from their loved ones to other pigeon trainers - which is especially cruel since pigeons are monogamous - and wringing the necks of birds who don't perform well, distressing and widowing other birds in the process.

"The races themselves can also be deadly since pigeons are vulnerable to birds of prey and are hurt or killed during storms, as commonly happens since bad weather rarely if ever causes a race to be cancelled."

Guilmette disagrees. He and all of the club racers he knows keep well maintained and clean lofts for their pigeons, he said, and if the weather presents any danger to the birds during a race, the event is cancelled or postponed.

"These birds wouldn't be coming home if they weren't well taken care of," Guilmette said. "That's pretty easy to understand. It's just like honeybees. If you don't take care of your bees, you'll lose them all."

MAKING FRIENDS OVER FEATHERS

For Guilmette, getting involved in pigeon racing has been as much about the friendships he's formed as it has been about the racing and the breeding. Now in his third year of racing, he's got most of the basics down but is still learning some of the secrets that make for successful pigeons. For the second year in a row, he's bred the fastest yearling bird in the group.

"This club that we're in, we all share knowledge and train each other's bird," Guilmette said. "Not every club is like that. Some are very secretive, but not us. Anybody in the club can come out and handle my birds and see what I'm doing."

Last year the Guilmettes' birds faired well in several races, and that's something they would like to see continue. One of their birds was even named the Yearling of the Year for the club they compete in.

"Last year my wife and I did really well," Guilmette said. "This year some of the old-timers are back and my wife and I are having a little bit harder of a time, but hey, we just started. We still have a lot to learn."

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