MACHINE PIGEONS OF THE MODERN AGE

by John Clements

My nineteen late-breds that were trained during the winter are going out every day and flying really well around home clearly out-flying my older pigeons.  I do not mind winter weather because I want them to get used to the kind of weather common at this time of the year.  I certainly do not want to mollycoddle them.

After flying extreme long distance pigeons for many years now I have come to realize that there are two types of training. The first is training for speed to win races.  The second is training for the experience. This is preparation for the journey they might experience in later life when they are forced to fly alone for a part of the race.

If you are training for speed the one thing you must accept is that pigeons fly faster in a flock then they do alone. If that is the case you must train them to home in a flock, navigate as a flock and know each other intimately within the flock. Ideally, if this kind of training is efficient and well done, the leading flock in any race should be composed entirely of pigeons that are all coming to the same loft. If you can achieve this situation you are home and dry and will not only win races but you will win federations and not just win with the occasional single pigeon but with a whole flock of them.

How to achieve this requires thought.  First we must accept and believe that pigeons can and do recognize each other not only on the ground and in the loft but also in the air.  So, everything possible must be done to the group to make sure the pigeons are so familiar with each other in the loft and in the air that they are likely to form a group when racing home.  This can be done and the way to do it is to repeatedly train them in a group perhaps twice a day so that they are not allowed unstructured free time. These pigeons must be housed in a group so they see only their fellow group members during their entire life.

The group must be small enough for this to happen. If it is too large (more than twenty) it is too large for the necessary familiarization between individuals to take place. Ideally the group must be no more than ten pigeons so this means the race team has to be split into sections of ten in each where each group of ten is trained and isolated from the others.

Various tricks can be employed in group training a single hen or a couple of hens can be placed at the home end to encourage fast group flight. These hens should not be locked in their boxes but allowed to be free for the entire group to fight over.  There must always be someone at the home end who knows the system. He or she must get the first group into the loft before the second group arrives. Groups should never be allowed to mix

You will need to experiment with various types of motivation to keep interest sharp and keen.  It may well be a short couple of weeks’ rest is required during the season to rejuvenate motivation. Of course in all systems there are downsides. In really bad weather when the group gets split you can expect a really bad race. Generally speaking this robotic system can only work with yearlings. Adolescent pigeons, like child soldiers everywhere, are easily managed and have yet to experience a free and natural life yet still have the energy of youth. As Charlie Chaplin said at the end of ‘The Great Dictator’, “We have machine men, machine minds and machine hearts” but in our case we have adolescent machine pigeons. 

This is of course entirely different to how I expect to train my own late-breds. It is so different it might as well be an entirely different sport. Still this is what all creative dictator people will do to win, they will find a way to dictate better and more effectively. In all cases such as this the method is superior to the pigeon, whereas in my late bred long distance system the individual is superior to the method. I take my cue from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where the rare individual managed to out score those reared on the method and the method machine itself was found ultimately to be flawed. That is why I can quite reliably forecast only two of my original twenty late bred pigeons will ever make it to fly 700 miles successfully by the time they are three years of age simply because all 700 mile two-day pigeons must be treated as individuals.

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