Booze, rivalry and more
If you blindly accept everything that people want you to believe in pigeon sport, you have to possess an elastic mind.
I've said it before, trade in health is hot.
Health and diseases, a favorite topic of conversation for many women.
A fellow teacher once swore to me that alcohol was pure poison. A glass of beer would destroy countless brain cells.
When I heard it, I immediately stopped drinking, because with a head without a brain, you might start reasoning like a headless chicken.
An unforgivable mistake, as it turned out.
Scientists at Erasmus University claim that a daily glass of wine is healthy.
So non-drinkers were wrong. And leaving the bottle untouched was a major blunder, as it turned out later.
My ‘winegrower’ will get a good customer, I promise you. It will be hard with champagne and wines back on the menu every day, but I will persevere. You have to have something to spare for your health.
ALSO PIGEONS
Scientists who replace old truths with new ones is not new.
It is no different in pigeon sport.
Some change their mind just as easily as a prostitute change clients.
Some writers, even old monuments from the Stone Age, do the same.
I gave some old pigeon books to a novice fancier, after all, you cannot keep everything, but not after I had browsed through some again.
For example, I read that you can't remove pigeons that don't perform quickly enough from the loft. 'Then you also get more oxygen.'
In the next book you could read that taking widowers from the loft during the season can ruin the atmosphere to such an extent that the form disappears.
I believe in the latter after that cursed race from Homburg Germany.
It was a long time ago but I still remember it like it was yesterday. We were forced to fly from Homburg, actually, 'had to' is the wrong word. Because in a human life, only two things really have to be done: Dying and paying taxes.
Many of my fellow fanciers passed. No pigeons to Germany for them.
I had planned not to participate either, but encouraged by the successes of the weeks before, when they also flew from another direction (Arlon), I became overconfident and overconfidence has often been punished.
TURN-OFF
The weather was good the day that Homburg was raced and at first it didn't seem to be much of a problem because the pigeons arrived fairly quickly. Until the arrivals stalled. It surprised me but ok no more than that.
I went to the clubhouse with the clock, the result was fine although the prize percentage was less than usual, but you can't have everything. Back home I immediately went to see which ‘late comers’ got home.
What a shock. Nothing !!!
For two days, to the amazement of my wife, I was weeding the garden, but I had more eyes for the pigeon loft than the weeds.
The following days the lofts were also monitored in such a way that I got a stiff neck. No birds ever came back.
AFTERWARDS
Every time I was confronted with that hopeless amount of empty boxes of previously proven toppers, something went through my mind like 'this cannot be true'.
And this was not the end of the chapter on 'Homburg'.
When I let the rest of the widowers loose, some of them refused to leave the loft.
The day of basketing that followed I said to club members:
"I think I'm going to gain popularity, I'm not going to play well."
'We know that', they said, but I didn't let myself be happy or fooled. Because nobody needs to tell me how widowers in shape behave.
There is nothing to win with pigeons that are too tame to even leave the loft and that, after you have chased them out, turn perfunctorily in circles, even if it is for an hour.
They, the widowers, didn't pick themselves up again that year.
So it seems that you have to leave a loft of widowers intact.
Because with the pigeons, the atmosphere disappears and with the atmosphere, the form. It is best to leave the 'rivals' there who live to the left, right or above your 'good blue'.
RIVALRY
It's reminiscent of what Devos often told me. His Didi had a loft to himself. A week before he was to be basketted for a national race, another cock was placed in the loft and the flame went up. The Didi's eyes spit fire and it didn't stop there.
Etienne was forced to lock it up or he would not have survived.
When Didi, the pigeon that had been alone in the loft for so long as a hermit, arrived victorious from I think Dax, the first thing he did was not fly to his hen but to the box where he suspected the intruder.
Who said that the role of the hen in widowhood is limited?
AND VICE VERSA?
'If the condition can plummet when you remove pigeons from the loft, what about the other way around?' you might ask.
Would the condition and motivation possibly increase if you add pigeons during the season?
Yes, possibly. But a problem with widowers is that they get so excited that they don't eat much and waste energy in the loft.
And if the race that follows is a tough one, it can be counterproductive.
For example, I once made the mistake of putting some breeders among the racers. . Though they performed well before.
War !!! The race that followed was far and tough and the pigeons came up short, something I already suspected when I basketed them.
In the basket they were restless, in the hands nervous and too light.
Experimenting tricks sometimes seems like a game of all or nothing and when pigeons have to fly for many hours with a headwind, it is usually nothing.
BABIES
You often have a problem after a bad race with youngsters. When a lot of latecomers come home totally distraught, sometimes even the next day or days, everything can be turned upside down in a loft with birds in shape.
Not only because of the many empty spaces in the loft, but distraught latecomers without energy also bring the rest down.
Also because pigeons lack rivals.
And rivals are needed to give an extra boost to attachment to the territory that can increase form. So I don't think the writer of that first book was right. But maybe the writer of this column won't either...