Pigeon racing

Yep. You heard me right. I was digging through old stories I'd written for sports and ran across this gem I wrote in April 2006. I promise, I'd only forgotten for a minute.

I wish you could see the reactions I get when people hear that I wrote about this. I always tell them, it really was a fascinating story. It's not like football or baseball, where a sports reporter is expected to know all the ins and outs of the sport. Writing about obscure sports like this was refreshing. Questions like what? why? how? flowed quite freely and an hour and two glasses of Boll Weevil tea later, I had more than enough material to write a story that makes people still say, "You wrote about what?"

It should be noted that this story ran during Master's Week.

Computers aid in pigeon races
By Lisa Kaylor Staff Writer

This weekend, sports fans all over the world will be watching for eagles on the greens of Augusta. But at least 11 will be watching the blue above for different types of birdies: homing pigeons.
The Georgia/Carolina Racing Pigeon Club has members in Louisville, Ga., Thomson, Beech Island, Wagener, and Monetta, S.C., as well as Augusta.
Saturday, one member will drive 200 miles to release nearly 150 birds. The winner will be the bird who averages the fastest time to reach his home.
"They've all got a natural instinct to get home. We just use it to compete," said Tom McPherson, who has been a member of the club on and off for more than 20 years.
At first blush, the sport sounds simple enough: release the birds - around 10 to 15 per member - all at once and the fastest time wins. But in practice, it's much more complicated than that.
The birds fly home to their lofts rather than to a central location. Because the lofts are located so far apart, it would be impossible for the birds to reach their individual finish lines at comparable times. Therefore, each bird is required to wear a band around its leg that has something similar to a bar code on it.
The band is scanned as the bird crosses a sensor located in the entrance to the loft, marking the bird's time of arrival into a clocking device. A Global Positioning System determines the longitude and latitude of each loft in the club as well as the release point, and those measurements are used to determine a bird's average speed in yards per minute from the release point to its loft. After the race, each member of the club brings their clocking device to a central location, where the information is downloaded into a computer program specifically designed for this purpose. The program uses all of the gathered information to determine the winner of the race.
The unusual thing about racing pigeons is that winning is not necessarily determined by the athletic ability of the birds.
"Everybody's birds are about equal," McPherson said. "The care they receive is not equal, and that's where you can get the advantage on somebody is to take better care (of your birds)."
The pigeons are fed twice a day and given medication and vitamins. Their lofts must be kept very clean in order to keep the birds free of such pests as fleas, ticks, mites, and flies - anything that might pose a danger to the birds.
And though the birds have a homing instinct, they still must be trained. Young birds receive training with short flights around the loft at first, typically for 30 to 45 minutes per flight.
Once they are accustomed to entering the loft, they are taken farther and farther away to practice finding their way home in preparation for the races, which begin at 100 miles at the start of the season and end with a 500-mile race at the end of the season.
Some birds do get lost at races of more than 200 miles, and because the owners can't be with them, they often don't know exactly what happened to them.
"If you do a good job of training them, then when you lose a bird like that, it's because of the elements," said Johnny Hutcheson, the Georgia/Carolina Racing Pigeon Club's press secretary, adding that hawks tend to be the biggest threat to the pigeons. Because of the time and care lavished on the birds, the owners agree that losing one hurts. But they said that it is just a part of the sport.
Hutcheson said that pigeon racing is the ideal family sport, because anybody can participate.
"My grandson helps me continuously with my loft, and we have a ball with it," he said.
At the local level, it is not done for the prize money. One must compete at the national level for that.
"This is just for the entertainment and enjoyment," McPherson said.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/040606/oth_76291.shtml