the correct term is muffs — are several 

 inches long. And then there are Sile- 

 sian Moorheads, Skinnums, Runts, 

 Oriental Turbits, and Barred Bon- 

 dinets. There are laughers and 

 trumpeters whose ancestral coos have 

 been altered beyond recognition. Per- 

 haps strangest of all are the Parlor 

 Tumblers, flightless birds who will 

 turn somersaults if you touch 

 them on the head. 



Pigeon fanciers, like 

 dog breeders, have cre- 

 ated standards for all 

 these breeds and 

 they hold peri- 

 odic shows to 

 judge their 

 eff o r t s . 

 The 



Historical Pictures Service, Chicago 



biggest of these is the National Pigeon Show, an annual 

 event that attracts 8,000 to 10,000 birds, and their 

 breeders, from all over the world. 



Jacobins, Duchesses, and the rest are called fancy 

 pigeons, in distinction to the racing homers. The hom- 

 ers are bred for winning races, and in them the strength, 

 speed, stamina, and homing ability of wild pigeons have 

 been reinforced by generations of selective breeding. 



Bob Adolph, president of a downstate pigeon club, 

 told me that as many as 600,000 people in the U.S. raise 

 pigeons, and many of these belong to clubs that organize 

 races. The shortest race in such competitions is 100 

 miles. Six hundred miles is a common distance, and 

 some clubs run 1,000-mile races. 



Adolph's club uses Tulsa as a starting point for the 

 600-mile race. Usually, Ozark Air Lines flies the birds to 

 Tulsa and releases them, preferably early in the morning. 

 Once the birds are on the wing, the airline calls Adolph 

 to pass along the time of release. Late in the day, if all 

 goes well, the tired birds will be back at their home 

 roosts. 



The speeds these racing birds maintain are almost 

 unbelievable. One of Adolph's birds covered 700 miles 

 in 13 hours and 10 minutes. According to my calculator, 

 the bird averaged about 53 miles an hour for the entire 

 flight. 



The process of preparing birds for such achieve- 

 ments begins when they are two or three months old. At 

 that age, Adolph take his birds a mile or two from home 

 and lets them fly back. He gradually increases the dis- 

 tance, but he doesn't start letting them try the long 

 flights until they are a year old. After those first short 

 flights around the roost, the birds need no more practice 

 at homing. From then on the long flights are only for 

 conditioning, like the practice runs of a marathoner. 



The homing abilities of pigeons are just a special 

 instance of the navigational skills possessed by many 

 birds. We know that pigeons use landmarks — including 

 buildings and other creations of humanity — for orienta- 

 tion. But a pigeon starting out on a 600-mile race is not 

 going to get very far relying on landmarks. We know that 

 pigeons, like other birds, use the sun as a compass, and 

 that they know how to compensate for the time of day 

 and the sun's apparent movement through the sky. We 

 also know that pigeons released on overcast days can im- 

 mediately orient themselves toward home — unless they 

 are wearing magnets. William T. Keeton of Cornell 

 University ran a series of experiments, attaching mag- 

 nets to some birds and magnetic brass bars to others. The 

 birds wearing brass usually oriented toward home as soon 

 as Keeton released them. The magnetized birds scattered 

 at random. Keeton concluded that the birds were using 

 the earth's magnetic field to show them the correct 

 direction. 



No recital of the virtues of pigeondom would be 

 complete without the most extravagently compli- 

 mentary words ever written about Columba livia. They 

 come from T. H. White's book The Goshawk, an account 

 of White's attempt to train a goshawk for falconry. He 

 trapped pigeons to feed his hawk, and sometimes he re- 

 sented the cautious way his quarry avoided the trap. But 

 as he thought more about pigeons, he realized how 

 admirable they were: 



"What a peace-loving but prudent race they were," 

 [he wrote] "not predatory and yet not craven. Of all the 

 birds, I thought, they must be the best citizens, the most 

 susceptible to the principles of the League of Nations. 

 They were not hysterical, but able to escape danger. For 

 panic as an urge to safety they substituted foresight, cun- 

 ning and equanimity. They were admirable parents and 

 affectionate lovers. They were hard to kill. It was as if 

 they possessed the maximum of insight into the basic 

 wickedness of the world, and the maximum of cir- 

 cumspection in opposing their own wisdom to evade it. 

 Grey quakers incessantly caravanning in covered 

 wagons, through deserts of savages and cannibals, they 

 loved one another and wisely fled. " FH 



