OFF TO THE RACES - Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative

Up, up and away: Time after time, logic-defying flights bring pigeons, the thoroughbreds of the sky, safely back home.
Off
theRaces
to
BY HELEN CORDES • PHOTOS BY WILL VAN OVERBEEK
As Jim Keng stood sentry, scanning the skies from his
patio in La Porte, he had a healthy hunch that Miss Elite
would be the first bird home. Sure enough, the petite,
1-pound pigeon made a final circle above Keng’s backyard,
swooped smoothly onto the stoop, and walked calmly back
into a pigeon loft.
Miss Elite had just wrapped up a mind-boggling feat: She
Nobody knows for sure how racing pigeons find their way home. But there’s
little mystery as to why pigeons would want to return to this airy, spacious
building built by Harry Rauch that looks more like a guesthouse than a birdhouse.
Rauch, a Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative member, provides his
birds special grain mixes and weekly baths to keep their feathers primed for
flight. Research suggests that pigeons navigate their way home by using the
sun's position and Earth's magnetic field as a compass. They also rely on a
keen sense of sight, smell and sound.
8 TEXAS CO-OP POWER July 2011
flew 10 hours straight, at 50 mph, from 500 miles away in
Hoxie, Arkansas. With her uncanny internal GPS and singleminded
determination, she made a beeline for one tiny speck
in a semirural neighborhood just east of Houston.
Every time Miss Elite arrives home from the long-distance
races she’s aced to earn elite-flier status, “she still looks like a
million bucks,” says Keng, an affable general contractor who’s
president of the Texas Center of Racing Pigeon Clubs.
For Keng and the other 400 or so pigeon racers in Texas,
moments like Miss Elite’s quiet triumph are unforgettable.
It’s the payoff for pampering the pigeons from egg to birth
and beyond, patiently training them day after day to carry
out their ancestral mission of flying home—fast. For many
owners of these so-called thoroughbreds of the sky, it’s all
part of a thrilling high-stakes sport that pits top fliers for
lucrative purses at races like the annual Texas Showdown
and Texas Gusher, two of the state’s top pigeon competitions.
For the rest of us, it’s an astounding reminder of the abilities
of pigeons to perform jaw-dropping feats while carrying
on one of the world’s oldest methods of communication.
“The Romans and Greeks used pigeons widely to carry
messages,” enthuses Bulverde’s Robert Tomlinson, a pigeon
racer and former executive vice president of the Oklahoma
City-based American Racing Pigeon Union, which has close
to 700 clubs and 10,000 members. For centuries, pigeons
provided postal services—everywhere from a fully birdstaffed
service in 12th century Baghdad, Iraq, all the way up
to India’s Police Pigeon Service, an 800-bird “P-mail” service
for emergency messages that was used until 2002.