Les J Parkinson - What’s on my mind.
I am reducing my time spent on writing and will be sending no more to the BHW. I will be reducing my time spent at the PC so results I will leave out, but they will be seen in full elsewhere on the Elimar website, this will save me time. My first article for the BHW was done with the help of Ernie Harbourne and was published in the Blackpool show edition of 1977. I remember that one well because it was the year the Olympiade was held at the Winter Gardens. Since then, we have travelled far and wide in search of information and as Elizabeth will tell you we have spent many hours on the road. Now we have the internet, and everything we do as scribes is so much easier, we even get our spelling mistakes corrected for us. In those early days the staff at the BHW had to type many articles out because many of those articles from scribes were mostly handwritten. Especially in the 70’s & 80’s Elizabeth and myself used to spend most of our weekends travelling up and down the country visiting fanciers and writing articles. I don’t think many realise what it cost us scribes to write articles on other people. We always looked at it from the point of view that we enjoyed the weekends away, the poor car clocked up some miles, unlike today’s which is 6yrs old and has only done 20,000mls. I did notice that in the last 12 months we have done less than 3,000mls. We have the van for training so that helps, mind you that’s parked up nearly all winter.
Young birds.
I have mentioned young bird losses a time or two and losses and not getting any better. Apparently, this is not just happening here in the UK, some continental fanciers are also experiencing heavier than usual losses. In front of my keyboard, I have 11 x 2024 rings taken off pigeons for one reason or another. 3 were returned to me after the birds had been found dead, I know of one other that is dead which I don’t have the ring for. This one was taken to the vets badly knocked up and the impression that I got from the vet was, unless I wanted the pigeon to breed off it was never going to do any good, and they would sort it, this would obviously be at a high price. I phoned a fancier who lived near to the vet who collected the pigeon for me and reported back that it was not in a good state. The pigeon was a grizzle and was one of Ebony’s, so I arranged for Steve to pick the pigeon up, in the hope that we could get it something like. Andrew later saw a big deterioration in the pigeon and didn’t expect it to last so the decision was made. The rest have come back severely damaged beyond repair for the future. I would think this is a clear case of BOP attacks and the pigeons diving everywhere to avoid capture only to hit something and rule them out of any future racing capabilities. Craig called round a few days ago and was telling me that he had been looking on the social media sites and had seen many names mentioned who experienced heavy losses, especially on the weekend of the 3rd August. We didn’t do so badly with 38 on the day and one next morning, so all is well at the moment. Mind you we have experienced 28 losses from the team of 71 but they now seem stable in numbers so here’s hoping that remains for the rest of the season. As I sit here there have only been two weekends of young bird racing and we have only entered on the second week, so early days.
Race information.
As mentioned earlier I am cutting back on writing because I am struggling for time and energy, they tell me it’s called old age, catches up with us all sooner or later. The second weekend’s racing that I mentioned saw Ebony win the voucher and cash with her nomination, thanks to Phil Buckton for his generosity in sponsoring the races at Middlewich. Think she nominated this one because it was a fancy blue pied, doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you win. I can’t complain she did give me the voucher for the corn. That means for the next couple of weeks she will be feeding her own pigeons instead of out of my corn bin. Ebony is one of those who has lost most of her young bird team, hang on a minute she did that last year and thrashed me in the remaining young bird races, watch this space. What does this mean, well it means that when we are in the garden waiting for the birds to come from training, she is listening to me. Another pointer that shows she is listening was when she was feeding them after training one morning. As I have mentioned I set the ETS for the training as well as the races. Ebony came out of the loft with Roger in her hands, by the way Roger is a young bird that decided he would get more corn here than his previous owner Roger Sutton’s. I don’t pick out young birds anymore, I wait until racing is over and then check them out. That was the reason I had not noticed this one when we had 71 young birds in the loft. I spoke to Roger, and he said if it stays, we will transfer it which we did. He has a National Gold Ring on so the next question is, if he stays can I enter him in the NFC Gold Ring race, if so and he wins, those winnings will go to Roger and not me. I am sure someone will tell me about this, after all it is a Gold Ring so why can’t it compete for the money raised from sales.
ETS.
I presume everyone else does what I do and that is have the ETS set for training as well as racing. A strange thing happened on the weekend of the 3rd August when we were racing from Cheltenham. I say strange because all week I had been keeping an eye on the ETS with the birds from training because I had odd ones that were not registering on the system. In the race on the following Saturday there were 8 that did not register including the first bird, which could possibly have won the race, had I not had to go in catch the bird and put it over the pad, when it did eventually register. I mentioned this to Nigel Shaw, and he told me a friend of his had a similar problem on the same day, strange. During the old bird season, I had the odd ones that were not registering on the M3 series system, but never the same pigeon. When I first started using the ETS system many years ago they were not registering very well at all. I watched them and could see the problem straight away, some were cutting corners and missing the main part of the pad that records the ring. So, I made a tunnel for them to go through and that cut out the corner cutting, and they began to register much better. I then watched them from training the following week and they were registering with no problem. My problem is what happened on the 3rd August for a total of 8 pigeons not to register on the system. I have included a photo of the tunnel I use to direct them over the area where the censors are in the pad.
Les Parkinson. 11 Rushton Drive, Middlewich, Cheshire, CW10 0NJ.
Tel: +44 (0)1606 836036. Mob: +44 (0)7871 701585.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Web site: http://www.elimarpigeons.com