Race fans indulge flights of fancy

The homing pigeon fanciers' group will mark its 125th anniversary.
By DON SAPATKIN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
PHILADELPHIA -- At precisely 8:30 a.m. on a recent October Saturday, 345 pigeons were liberated from a truck parked on a plateau in Cadiz, Ohio.
The birds shot from their cages at once. Pandemonium briefly reigned. And then the pigeons raced east toward home -- Gloucester City, Pa., (312.5 miles), Chester, Pa., (297.7 miles), Newark, Del. (289.7 miles).
Many of the men who live at those locations, 45 in all, had been up for hours checking on weather conditions (brisk 15 to 20 mph tailwinds the whole way). By midafternoon, they were checking in by cell. ("Nothing? Well, keep looking.")
Local pigeon races are run nearly every weekend in spring and fall. Adrenaline is high. But if you ask these men why they spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a year on a sport rooted in a different age, winning rarely comes up.
Fascination
Fascinating does, as in:
They take turns sitting on the eggs. ... When they first fly around, they're like kids learning how to walk.
And, of course, the mystery that scientists still cannot fully explain: They come home.
Six hours after the birds' release, George Watson gripped a toy baseball bat, ready to swing at any hawk diving for dinner in his Chester back yard.
His nine pigeons were late.
Watson, 62, has been at this since an older brother gave him five breeding pairs at age 13. With another sibling, he won a 300-mile race the next fall.
Now retired, Watson can spend more time with his 150 pigeons. He starts training young birds in June with introductions to the world outside their coop, then "tossing" them successively greater distances.
Watson ducked into his racing loft and emerged stroking a light bluish-gray pigeon with black-checked wings, band No. 31421. The brightness of its eyes, whiteness of its wattle, shape of its body and silkiness of its feathers -- all are part of the pigeon-making recipe that he fine-tunes race by race.
"To me that's the most fascinating part of it," he said, "always trying to improve the family that you have."
Homing instincts
Like dogs selectively bred to herd or retrieve, the wild rock dove's homing instincts have been improved and employed by man over millennia. Reuters began using carrier pigeons to deliver stock prices in 1849. G.I. Joe was credited with saving the lives of 1,000 British soldiers in 1943. The stuffed cock now resides at Fort Monmouth, N.J., where Army birds trained for three wars.
New Jersey once had a surfeit of racers. So did Philadelphia; the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers will celebrate its 125th anniversary here next month.
Dying sport
Just a dozen clubs now race in the city and suburbs. The sport is dying, along with its demographic bulge: older white men, largely ethnic and blue collar. Exceptions are mainly among immigrant populations; pigeon-racing is big worldwide.
But the passion remains.
On Oct. 13, crates full of pigeons arrived at a one-room clubhouse in National Park for South Jersey's fund-raiser two days later.
Tips were shared. (Giving a cock one hour with his hen before a race makes him fly home faster; better yet, let him see her with another male.) Birds with microchips in their leg bands were scanned in like chickens at the register. Others got bands stamped by tamper-proof, mechanical clocks. The loaded truck was sent to Cadiz.
Since birds fly to different lofts, honors go not to the first arrival but to the fastest flier based on time and distance.
Still, the lack of pigeons over Chester by the afternoon of their release was not promising. Watson remembered a 1998 race when thousands disappeared. It happens now and then, blamed on sunspots or fog or cell phones, though no one really knows.
This race turned out to be one of those times. By sundown, only 19 of the 345 pigeons had flown home. The race officially closed a day late with 78 birds, enough to award the 60 prizes.
A guy in Gloucester County took first, second and ninth ($4,600 total). One of Watson's nine fliers placed 52nd.
"We don't know where the birds went," said Rich Underwood, 55, race secretary and pigeon trainer-for-hire. Six of his own 14 entries straggled back after a few days; another walked into a farmer's barn in West Virginia on the following Wednesday.