The year is rattling along at a rapid rate of knots but apparently still with very little of major interest happening in our world of pigeons. Everyone has gone very quiet, maybe they are all secretively sifting through their new crop of youngsters anxiously searching for signs of those as yet undiscovered champions, so let us all hope that no news is good news. Sifting through mine took all of five minutes and has resulted in nothing to make the heart beat faster.
I was recently able to enjoy a great day up at Bradfield, near Reading, for the Norman & Eileen Dance Memorial Show, a good show and a wonderful day, made even more pleasurable by being able to spend time with a few of my old friends. These are a great bunch of guys who really do enjoy their social day out at a pigeon show. It was nice to see Pat (Pratt) looking robust and perky as ever. Whilst probably not quite as fit as the proverbial butcher's dog, he certainly seemed as fit as the greyhounds he enjoys walking out and he certainly still puts a smile on the faces of the ladies. Sadly by being at Bradfield I had to miss a similar day out up with the Nottingham lads who are another group who take their social side very seriously, hopefully the two dates will not clash next year so that I can enjoy two good days out.
A few years back, a couple of pairs of genuine, 20 feather, cone-tailed Garden Fantails used to drift around our village. They then started visiting our garden where they were enthusiastically fed by the lady of the house. Over the years the numbers increased until earlier this year we were daily hosts to around 50 of them, the majority of them still sporting a pleasant 16 to 20 semi-cone tail. Having decided that enough was enough I set up a trap and managed to catch 22 of them, put plastic rings on them all and shipped them off to a farm some 35 straight line miles away. Within a matter of an hour the first of them was back in our garden. So much for the theory of fancy pigeons not having the homing instinct, nor of being particularly intelligent. I have heard of racing pigeons, on their first training toss, getting lost from that distance.
Read more in the August 2008 issue of Feathered World
