Pigeons Anyone?

[Joel]

Just curious if anyone here keeps homing pigeons as they have always fascinated me. I hope to get into that someday if I ever move out to the country. Wouldn't it be cool if a few of us got into that, we could send each other messages "AIRMAIL". 8)

[The Outlaw]

I had them when I was a kid. I don't remember a whole lot about them other than they reproduce at an alarming rate and are quite messy. I think we had rollers and some really fancy ones that looked very much like parrots.

The way I got mine was from my uncle. He and my father raised Irish Setters, Gordon setters and pointers. They would train young dogs to point by putting pigeons into a nylon stocking and hiding them in brambles and under leaves.

The young dogs were taken out with an older, trained dog and they'd have to find them, point and upon command, flush them out. In all of the years that my dad trained dogs, only one pigeon was ever killed. It was scooped up by a very young pointer who ran off with it. Not a feather was disturbed, but its legs got broken from being thrashed through the forest. I assume it died from shock.

I don't recommend this method, but they were Irishman that learned their trade from the old country. And, for the record, they had some awesome bird dogs.

I lost all of my pigeons when I was about 12. I think they had picked up some avian disease, but since I was just a kid and daddy wouldn't have known a vet that treated birds, they simply died. Maybe that's why I'm so vigilant now about my birds.

THE OUTLAW