1 Select a pedigreed Racing Pigeon For Sale. It is important that the information you receive about a pigeon is honest and accurate.
2 Read about the wins and breeding performance of the pedigree you selected.
3 Determine which breeding system you will use. There are three breeding systems: cross-breed, line-breed and in-breed.
4 Interview other racing pigeon owners. Decide if you can meet the challenges of cross-breeding. The largest challenge is the financial cost associated with a bird that has had no relationship with your bird for five generations.
5 Learn about line-breeding before make a decision. You will need to avoid in-breeding so you must have the appropriate knowledge of birds. Line-breeding is less risky and expensive than cross-breeding.
6 Consolidate the desirable genes of a pigeon family--allow next generation breeding between the pigeons. This is in-breeding.
7 Make sure that culling is something you can do with your flock before you begin. Not everyone can kill an animal.
The Racing Homing Pigeons are a variety of dom`estic pigeons derived from the Rock Pigeon (Columba livia domestica) selectively bred to find its way home over extremely long distances. The wild rock pigeon has an innate homing ability, meaning that it will generally return to its own nest and its own mate. This made it relatively easy to breed from the birds that repeatedly found their way home over long distances. Flights as long as 1800 km (1,118 miles) have been recorded by birds in competition pigeon racing. Their average flying speed over moderate distances is around 80 km/h (50 mph),but speeds of up to 125 km/h (75 mph) have been observed.
Pigeon Racing is the sport of releasing specially trained Racing Homing Pigeons, which then return to their homes over a carefully measured distance. The time it takes the animal to cover the specified distance is measured and the birds rate of travel is calculated and compared with all of the other pigeons in the race to determine which animal returned at the highest speed.
Pigeon Racing requires a specific breed of pigeon bred for the sport, the "Racing Homer". Competing pigeons are specially trained and conditioned for races that vary in distance for approximately to 100 to 1000 km.
The winner of a pigeon race is the bird with the highest velocity,measured in ypm/mpm, this calculation demands the distance be divided in to yards, divide the yards by the number of seconds it took the bird to return then multiply by 60. Therefore Races can often be won and lost by seconds, and to measure this, many different timing apparatus have been developed. The traditional timing method involves rubber rings being placed into a specially designed clock, whereas a newer development uses RFID tags to record arrival time.
While there is no definite proof, there are compelling reasons to think the sport of racing pigeons may go back as least as far as 220 AD or possibly earlier. The sport achieved a great deal of popularity in Belgium in the mid 19th century. The pigeon fanciers of Belgium were so taken with the hobby that they began to develop pigeons specially cultivated for fast flight and long endurance called Voyageurs. From Belgium the modern version of the sport and the Voyageurs which the Flemish fanciers developed spread to most parts of the world. Once quite popular, the sport has experienced a downturn in participants in some parts of the world in recent years, possibly due to the rising cost of living, aging fanciers, and a severe lack of public interest.
