PIGEONS AS FOLLOWERS

AN INTRODUCTION TO INDIVIDUAL LONG DISTANCE THINKING

by John Clements

At least 90 percent of all pigeons are followers. If they are forced to fly on their own and do their own thing they are either well behind or fail altogether.

There are two ways of finding out if pigeons are leaders or followers. The first is to follow their racing career and statistically identify the evidence that they are top consistent individual performances over many races. The second method is to measure pigeon performance in difficult races where the conditions are so severe flocks are broken down into individuals. In cases like this 90 percent of pigeons either do not make it or are very late.

Difficult races can be divided into two. The first is bad weather or hard winds and the second is distance, but both have the same end effect, they divide the pigeon wheat from the pigeon chaff; they find pigeons that are happy to fly alone as opposed to those that need a flock in order to navigate. All this points to the unpalatable fact that many outright winners can also be followers.

Unfortunately, over the years, the importance of winning and first prizes has become so dominant in British pigeon culture the UK’s own breeding has declined. We in the UK no longer create British strains. We have in fact become consumers of strains bred in other countries. This may be good for those who sell pigeons or for Lier Market, but bad for the UK sport as a creative pigeon country in its own right.

There are hundreds of fanciers across the UK with lofts full of winning followers but few with a loft of leaders. Follower lofts may owe their success to sending more pigeons than their fellow competitors or to being lucky enough to be in a good Fed position, or both. Either way, they are in fact finding winners but not in fact finding good navigators that will leave something for future generations.

There are ways of encouraging individual behaviour but without the genes for individual navigation it is probably a waste of time except that confidence or the psychology to lone flying can be helped by adopting how we manage and train our pigeons from their early days. The object should be to find as many confident individual navigators as possible early in their careers to get the advantage of a long career in National or International racing where individual navigation is an absolute necessity.