Racehorses of the sky: Sterling birder celebrates 50 years racing homing pigeons
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| Devoe Manning of Dixon holds onto a pigeon Friday night at the Rock River Valley Racing Pigeon Club. (Philip Marruffo/pmarruffo@svnmail.com) |
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STERLING – These aren’t your garden-variety pigeons. Let these birds go, and they’ll fly 300 miles straight home in a half-day.
Norbert Padilla has been breeding and racing homing pigeons for about 70 years – ever since the Belgian population in Kewanee introduced him to the birds during his childhood.
Now Padilla, 79, of Sterling, is the oldest among an aging population of Sauk Valley residents who are looking to promote the sport of racing pigeons and attract a new generation of pigeon fanciers.
About 30 people meet at the Rock River Racing Pigeon Club, on Sterling’s west end, on Fridays during the summer. They send their birds to a designated drop point – often 300 miles away or more.
When released, the homing pigeons shoot straight into the air, then circle for 2 or 3 minutes. “And all of a sudden, they’ll make a straight beeline for the direction their home is,” Padilla said.
This week they’re going 320 miles to Shelby, Iowa. Birds are scored according to efficiency, and the winner averages the highest number of yards per minute. Prizes at the Sterling club are bragging rights, although the world’s most elite race, the Sun City Million Dollar Race in South Africa, offers $200,000 for first place.
“It’s something no scientist has ever been able to figure out: how these birds find their way home,” Padilla said.
Some attribute the homing to the sun, others to the Earth’s magnetic field. Some say the pigeons can sense tidal movements and adjust accordingly.
Whatever it is, retired Dixon schoolteacher Devoe Manning calls the phenomenon “an amazing thing to see.”
Manning, 58, started racing pigeons after leaving work, and although he got into birding late in life, he’s taking the opportunity to learn from their experiences, he said.
“I got into it later than most of these guys,” Manning said. “But I love watching these birds. They’re athletes.”
“A good pigeon man knows his pigeons, knows how they react to their training, knows how they react to their mates,” Padilla said. “You have to train them, you have to condition them ... for a pigeon to fly 500 miles in 12 hours, they have to be in pretty good condition.”
For all the devotion to the pigeons and the sport, the racers’ attitude at the club is relaxed.
Most sip beers in the old cinder block building on Griswold Avenue. They chat, and take turns stuffing pigeons into squat metal containers, and putting water into the shipping crates.
They inspect each other’s birds, as the race secretary scans a radio-tagged ankle band. As the pigeons return to their lofts, they pass over a scanner that checks them in. The owners then return to the club with a cartridge containing the race data, and compare results.
Pigeon fanciers call the birds “racehorses of the sky,” and some put the same amount of thought into breeding as do horse owners.
“My champion, he’s 16 years old ... I retired him about 9 years ago,” Padilla said. “I keep him for breeding. He has produced some of the best pigeons I have now.”
But, like horses, “just because they’re really good racers, doesn’t mean they’re good producers,” Padilla said.
According to Padilla, the longest flight recorded from the Sauk Valley was 1,100 miles, from Rock Falls to Boston, achieved when a local birder bought a pair of pigeons from a Boston breeder, and they got loose and flew back to their original loft in Beantown.
To the lay person, there appears to be little difference between common pigeons and homing pigeons. But homing pigeons are the result of thousands of years of selective breeding of the common rock pigeon, which has a latent homing tendency, Manning said.
For pigeon racers, though, a world of difference exists between common and homing breeds of pigeon.
“It’s like putting a mule next to a racehorse,” Padilla said.
To learn more
Interested in joining the Rock River Valley Racing Pigeon Club? Call 815-625-2651 for the secretary, or stop in 6-8 p.m. Saturday at 706 Griswold Ave. in Sterling. For information about the rules and regulations of the international sport of pigeon racing, go to www.pigeon.org online.
