Pigeons

  

I know I've talked about the pigeons I raised as a kid.  I started off with homers.

Dad would drive away with them in the morning and let them go on his way to work.  I'd wait at home for them to show up back at the home roost.  My partners in pigeons were Danny Murphy and David Frazier, two other kids in the neighborhood that I could swap birds and bird stories with.

 

I also had some fancy pigeons as well.  I recently looked around the internet and found some pictures of the pigeons I used to breed.  There were Fantails.

When Fantails are ready to strut, they open their tail like a peacock.

 

Helmets.

Kind of an understated elegance to helmets.

 

We had Pouters.

Although Pouters were more David Frazier's specialty than mine.

 

We had tumblers we could fly.

Some of the fancy pigeons don't really fly much anymore.  They're more for standing around than flying.  But tumblers can be flown.  They'll fly around in circles overhead and periodically do a bunch of backwards somersaults, then pick right back up flying again before they hit the ground.  It's kind of a weird thing to do.

 

There was the almost-mythical Jacobin.

We saw pictures of them in books from the library, but they were not a local bird.  None of us were ever able to get our hands on one.

 

And my specialty, the Frillback.

They were the most expensive pigeon I could get - I think they were fifteen dollars a pair - and I had success breeding them.  One pair of pigeons will raise two chicks at a time, and have several broods a year.  Many a high-school class of mine was spent calculating how many Frillbacks I would have to raise and sell to be rich; richer than I would already be, just by having that many Frillbacks.

 

Alas, when the free-range guinea pigs I had in the enclosure behind the garage, where the pigeon coop was, escaped into the neighbor's yard and the neighbor called the police because she thought she had been invaded by giant rats, the police notified us that there were no rules about loose guinea pigs, but the pigeon coop was in violation of local codes.  I had to get rid of all the pigeons.  Coincidentally, I was ready to move on to other things anyway, like girls and cars, so I sold the whole pigeon stock to David Frazier and went my way.