Pigeons on the move
Don Miner calls his charges “thoroughbreds of the sky,” and he has trophies that attest to their prowess. The 53-year-old Hayden resident’s hobby is racing pigeons, and he’s been training 80 of his birds for a series of races that begins late this month with a starting line in Pendleton, Ore.
One of those series, for “old” birds of 1, 2 and 3 years, will culminate in June with a 600- mile-plus dash from Carson City, Nev., to their North Idaho home.
He’ll begin racing his younger birds in September.
Miner moved here from Southern California five years ago with his wife, Mona, and his hobby.
“We visited North Idaho in the ‘60s and fell in love with it,” Miner says. “Finally, we just upped and moved.”
Miner’s hobby is a family legacy. His dad was a founder of the San Diego Homing Pigeon Club in 1940s, following by some 20 years the sport’s introduction into this country.
The Coeur d’Alene Glass employee claims he’s the only pigeon racer in North Idaho but says there are about 15 in Spokane and some 3,000 in the United States.
“The sport is big in New York, and huge in Florida,” he says, “but it’s much bigger in Europe, where even Queen Elizabeth is a pigeon-racing sponsor.”
Racing birds are pedigreed, and he tells of one stud called Fire Flight that an American fancier bought for $120,000 from a Belgian breeder in the late ‘90s. Miner paid $500 for a descendant of that bird.
He keeps 10 special pairs as breeder stock, but also allows his racers to breed.
“They’re beautiful, peaceful and affectionate animals,” he says. “And they mate for life.”
Their life expectancy, he explains, is 11 to 16 years.
Pigeon raisers teach their birds to return to their homes from places they’ve never visited. They find their way by smell, sight and the sun, Miner explains.
“Take away any of those, and the birds have a tough day.”
So, races are conducted only during daylight hours and, in this part of the country, they’re not flown in winter because of the unpredictability of our weather.
Miner feeds his birds a high-protein, high-carb diet consisting of safflower, oats and barley that costs him $200 a month. He vaccinates and otherwise medicates his birds himself and cleans their loft weekly.
He claims that all his birds are clean and healthy and that avian flu has never been passed to humans from pigeons.
The racers’ loft consists of two parts, a room where the birds eat, rest and nest, and an outside platform surrounded by wire which can be raised to release them.
Miner and other homing pigeon raisers affix to each young bird’s leg a band with a computer chip containing coded information that identifies the specific bird and the loft to which it belongs.
As part of their training, once the birds are on the platform, Miner closes one of the two doors to it. That leaves the second, a one-way door wired to an antenna. When a bird walks through it, the computer chip in the band triggers a sensor.
Once the young birds learn to return through that door, he releases them for daily exercise flights of about two hours.
To start a race, the birds are trucked to a distant location with racers from other lofts. An electronic device records when each bird is released.
They wing their ways to their separate homes at an average of 35 to 45 miles per hour on calm days with no wind. When they reach their homes, their leg bands trigger a clock as each bird passes through the one-way door.
Miner explains that the birds have no night vision so, if they’re caught out in darkness, they’ll head for a lighted area like a shopping center where they land to spend the night.
Once the birds get “road wise,” as he calls those that take a break during a race, he retires them.
About two birds out of every 50 he races fail to return home, he says.
Miner says the national organization to which he belongs, the American Pigeon Racing Union, donates thousands of dollars each year to the City of Hope, a biomedical research and treatment center and hospital for cancer and other life-threatening diseases.