The Art of Racing Pigeons

They get exhausted if they can’t make it back home and many die. [..] Pigeons can mate for life, and both the cock and the hen take turns sitting on the nest and feeding the hatchlings. Young homers are weaned and housed together at about six weeks old. After a few days of acclimation, a door in their pen is opened, and the birds begin to fly outside the loft but stick close to it. They’ll flock together, flying big circles, until the day comes that they stay aloft for an hour. That’s the signal, says Morse, that it’s time for road training. The birds are taken five miles away from the loft and released. “That first time, they make about thirty huge circles, figuring out where home is. But they do figure it out.”

Morse will do five days at five miles, then two days of loft flying, a kind of weekend of rest at home. The next week, it’s ten miles. When the birds start arriving home before him, it’s time to stretch out their mileage—twenty miles, then forty, sixty, and so on, until they successfully do one hundred miles three times before their first race. The longer flights build endurance, but it’s the early flights that reinforce the notion of home and the bird’s ability to get there. In a race, you want a pigeon to break fast and sure instead of wasting time circling or succumbing to the flock instinct and following other birds. “People get in a hurry for training distance, which is a mistake,” says Morse. “The five- and ten-mile trips are imperative. That gets them confident.” [..]