The flight of the “poor man’s racehorse”

The decline of pigeon racing in Alberta

The cooing pigeons fly around the loft, while the wind from their strong wings causes the walls to shudder and creak. These are not ordinary city pigeons. They are bigger and stronger. The kind specifically bred to race.

Nearly every aspect of the acreage is what anyone would associate with land in the country: a quaint house, gravel driveway, horses, and an abundance of pigeons circling over a loft. On a warm spring day, Fred Goodchild goes to his loft to check on his racing pigeons. While there, he bands a newborn pigeon, called a squab. He holds the pigeon with one hand, folding back the little feet and sliding on an identification tag. 

The first day of spring ushers in training — the race season starts in May.

“[Pigeon racing] was called the poor man’s racehorse for many years,” Goodchild says, seated at his kitchen table surrounded by racing clocks and stacks of meticulously maintained genealogy binders beginning in the ‘80s. As the recording secretary for the Northlands Invitational Homing Club (NIHC), he has witnessed the sport’s gradual decline firsthand.

As the fanciers meticulously log race times and tend over two dozen birds, they’re not just pursuing a hobby but also maintaining living artifacts of a working-class tradition. They turn pigeons into precision athletes capable of finding home from 500 miles away because of their love of pigeons.

The other founders, Jim Phelan and Dave Stead, sit across from Goodchild as he dives into the rich history of pigeon racing.

“It’s kind of a dying sport,” says Phelan, Club President of the NIHC, from across the table. Throughout the interview, the three club members explain the rising costs of pigeon racing in other places in the world and how younger members are becoming less likely to participate.

“A lot of guys that retired, it gave them something to do instead of sitting there watching TV or whatever,” says Phelan, “it gave [them] a hobby.”

A beaten path leads to the deck of the pigeon lofts. The lofts are large sheds that border Fred Goodchild’s land, with hand built cages for every pair of birds inside. The front decks are immaculately clean, and the insides are reminiscent of a standard barn — hay covers the inside and there is a fine layer of pigeon dust that is only seen on the clothes you’re wearing.

“Anybody could do it.”

Pigeon racing began in the 1800s in Belgium. While the sport has grown since then, it’s now declining. Whether because of import costs of pigeons from other areas or because of people’s perceptions of pigeons the racing groups are small. 

In Edmonton, there is the Capital City Racing Pigeon Association, Northlands Invitational Homing Club and 1.4 thousand members on the Edmonton Racing Pigeons Facebook page.  

The page feels like a lost pets page, filled with people showing photos of birds who are wearing a band that identifies them as an owned pigeon, often asking if anyone is missing their bird. 

Pigeon racing is a phenomenon that soars across the whole world. It’s especially popular in Asia, where there are 400,000 members in China. It’s also popular in Taiwan, but it’s steeped in controversy because of illegal gambling and animal rights abuses. 

In 2020, the most expensive pigeon was sold for 1.9 million USD  in Belgium. Canadian-traded pigeons may not cost as much as that, but they can range from $25 on kijiji to $2800 for a good racing pigeon.

Mike Tyson is famously known for loving his pigeons, and he estimates that he may own ‘Maybe a Thousand’. Tyson found a love of pigeons early as an escape from his childhood bullies and would later go on to reportedly get into his first fight because of somebody killing one of his pigeons.

“I was hooked.”

The high price of a bird didn’t stop Phelan from wanting one, even as a kid. “You can buy a pigeon [then] for 25 cents, 50 cents, but some of us didn’t have that either.” With a few of his childhood friends, Phelan explains how they’d climb the local bridge with a loaf of bread, and take some of the baby pigeons to raise. 

“I saw these pigeons, and I was hooked right there.” says Phelan.

When he was older, he worked in an airport and saw a pigeon fall out of the nest. “The janitor was going to kill it. I said ‘you can’t do that.’ So I raised the baby and that thing followed me everywhere,” says Phelan. “There was the one, and now I got thirty of them.”

As they collected pigeons, the world of pigeon racing opened up to them. 

Let the Race Commence

A race begins with a truck.

Outside the city, the racers meet and release their pigeons from their trucks to race back home. Once they get home, the time gets recorded electronically by a band on their foot which then sends a message to a computer. 

In addition to bragging rights, The NIHC also awards trophies and plaques to the winners of the races.

To maintain speed when it’s windy, pigeons fly low to the ground. Stead recalls when a friend of his was driving home from a race and noticed his pigeons were flying beside his truck, “Here’s the pigeons in the ditch, just giving ‘er.” 

This year, the race season for the club begins on May 9 and carries on until the end of September.

The sport of pigeon racing has been around for a long time, and Goodchild collects pigeon racing clocks from as early as the 1910s. Goodchild, Stead, and Phelan all explain that anybody could participate, but the threat of cheating is important to how these clocks are designed.

In 1915, the pigeon racing clock was a small handheld device with two holes and two stopwatches in it. The clock could only count two birds, but it would stop when the birds would drop their bands into the two holes located on top. With new innovations, clocks would stamp the clock-face onto paper, marking the time, and then the paper is punched when the machine is opened and closed.

Now it is all done electronically with devices akin to a graphing calculator and can scan up to 50 birds at once. 

“Don’t group that stuff that flies around wild [city birds] with domestic birds, it’s not even close,” says Stead, club treasurer of the NICH. The racing pigeons are bigger and faster than the common pigeon. 

“In still air, they can average 45 miles an hour,” says Goodchild, “With tailwind, depending on the strength of the tailwind and how many hawks are after them, they can do 60, 70 miles an hour average over a long distance.” These pigeons are able to maintain these speeds over long distances, while a hawk can fly quickly for a short time.

Training

“If you keep exercising their homing instinct, […] It gets sharper and sharper. And then we can take them out 500 miles and they’re home in 10 to 12 hours on a good day,” says Goodchild. 

The best way to maintain control of their birds is to control their food. Goodchild explains how he won’t feed the birds for a day or two and then lets them out of their lodge. Then he brings his red Folgers can filled with different types of seeds, and the pigeons race to get fed. 

He stresses that it doesn’t matter what works best for the pigeon fancier, as long as they are consistent: “Do the freaking Highland dance. But whatever you do, you do it every time.”

“Fred [Goodchild] was away last summer and I fed his birds,” says Stead, ”they see their red can even when they were all locked up […] Boom, they’re on the floor like a bullet.”

Despite the ease of training baby pigeons, anything older is difficult to train. The men try to never buy a pigeon that’s older than a year because it will fly back to its original owner. “I gave pigeons away and then they come back a year later,” says Phelan.

“Victory lap.”

As with all races, there are always memorable moments.

The men explain that another pigeon fancier couldn’t get his pigeon to land because it kept circling and circling overhead, doing a victory lap.

Goodchild describes one race where he was waiting for his pigeons to come home. He describes how he looked out across his field and saw a giant mass hovering three feet off the ground approaching his house. 

“It was 72 of my 73 young birds coming [home],” says Goodchild. “I got 72 of the first 73 prizes.”

Goodchild’s pigeons are already making laps around the loft, and with the racing season kicking off in May, the focus is training till then: “The important thing here right now is that they get up and they fly like this, and they’re starting to get into shape,” says Goodchild.