When Homing Pigeons Leave Home

Donnie Zehr Oct 16, 23

The birds have a nearly incontrovertible sense of home, and humans have long taken advantage of their ability to find their way, enlisting them for mail delivery, espionage—and sport.

n a bright, breezy Saturday not long ago, Sedona Murphy gave her homing pigeons away. Earlier that morning, the birds had flown around the neighborhood, looping over the shaggy old trees and the peaked rooftops of South Boston before returning to their gray shed in the Murphys’ back yard. They then toddled obligingly into their wooden case. These were racing birds, accustomed to being crated and carried, so the close quarters were nothing new, and they had no way of knowing that this was the last time they would ever fly free.

The pigeons were being given away because the Murphys were moving, and the pigeons would not assent to the move. No matter how much nicer the yard would be at the Murphys’ new house, in Southborough, a suburb west of Boston, the pigeons would always consider home to be the narrow wooden house on East Fifth Street that the Murphys were leaving behind. If the birds moved to Southborough and ever got out of their coop, they would race back to Fifth Street. Once in a while, pigeons that have to be moved—that is, pigeons whose owners are moving—can bond to a different coop. But, most of the time, birds raised by hand in a coop have no talent for living in the wild, so homing pigeons that have to be moved must be caged for the rest of their lives—they become what are called “prisoners.” In the best of circumstances, prisoners are kept in a large aviary, so that they have room to fly even though they can’t be let loose; in the worst, they never fly much again.

I got into the Murphys’ car with Sedona and her twin brother, Patrick, and their mother, Maggie; the pigeons were in their wooden case in the back seat, muttering to themselves like old men in a bingo hall. The highway was uncrowded. We ticked past several exits, until we were minutes from the headquarters of the South Shore Pigeon Flyers, one of the two dozen or so clubs in Massachusetts for homing-pigeon fanciers, where we would be leaving the birds.

Sedona was quiet. She is thirteen years old, a lean, leggy girl, with the luxuriant golden hair of a princess, but a grave, precise manner. Her posture is elegant. Her diction is occasionally exactly that of a person her age—earlier in the day she had announced, with amazement, that Grand Tetons means “big boobs”—but more often it is startlingly precise and sophisticated. Once when I was visiting her, she was showing one of the pigeons to a friend. The bird was squirming and pecking. Her friend squealed and said she thought the bird was icky. Sedona gave her a look, then turned the bird on its back and said firmly, “Hey! You’re being a dominant, dominant bird!”

South Shore Pigeon Flyers is housed in an old brown barn behind the home of the club’s president, Damian Levangie. When we pulled in, Levangie was standing on a small terrace off the second floor of the barn, his head tilted up. Maggie called out a greeting. “I can’t come down,” Levangie said. “I’m waiting for birds.” At six that morning, thousands of pigeons from the Boston area had been released near the Berkshire Mountains for a two-hundred-mile race, and Levangie’s flock was likely to be reaching home any minute; he would need to lure them across an electronic finish line so that their leg bands would trigger the timer used in official scoring.

“We have Sedona’s birds,” Maggie said.

“Just leave them,” Levangie said. Spotting a flash of wing in the sky, he swivelled around and began shaking a can full of grain to attract the birds’ attention, so they wouldn’t dawdle in the air too long before landing. Maggie and Sedona waited for a bit, but Levangie wasn’t budging. Finally, Sedona placed the case of pigeons near the barn, and then climbed into the car. By the time we got back to the Murphys’ house, a friend of the family’s, Jim Reynolds, was dismantling Sedona’s pigeon coop, restoring it to its original incarnation as a garden shed. Sedona stood at a distance, observing. “It looks empty,” she said. “Pigeonless.” Maggie watched the demolition with her. Out came the perches, the bird bath, the fifty-pound sacks of pigeon feed; off came the Lucite door the birds hopped through after they’d been flying around and were ready to come home.

This is both the marvellous and the problematical thing about racing pigeons: they have a fixed, profound, and nearly incontrovertible sense of home. Americans move, on average, every five years; pigeons almost never move. This gives the hobby of raising homing pigeons a curious permanence, a fixedness in space. It’s as if you had pasted your stamp collection on your bedroom walls and then, when it came time to move, you couldn’t get it unglued. The Murphys’ new house didn’t have an aviary, so Maggie felt the best solution was to persuade Sedona to give the pigeons to people in her racing club who did. Other pigeon racers, facing the same problem, decide they just can’t move. I spent much of this past racing season with Sedona and with Matt Moceri, who flies his birds with the Gloucester Racing Club, north of Boston. Matt, who is fifty-six, is slight and dark-haired, with a foghorn voice and a cheery manner. He has been raising birds since 1982, and always keeps a flock of at least sixty. Matt has lived in the same house in Gloucester for almost his entire life, but he would love to leave the cold, wet winters there for somewhere pleasant, like Tampa, Florida. He began to feel this most acutely five years ago, when he learned that he had cancer. “My wife wants to get something in Florida before I croak,” he said to me recently. “But I can’t do it with the birds. They belong to this house.”

If, in the Kentucky Derby, all the horses were trucked together to some remote spot and set loose, then galloped back to their respective barns, where they crossed a finish line, and their times were then compared and ranked in order by a race secretary (factoring in the difference in the distances to the various barns), you would have the equivalent of a pigeon race. It is the inverse of a group spectator sport. Birds in a race are all together only when they are first let go, which is done by a truck driver who transports all the competitors—thousands of them, in the big races—to the release point. None of the bird owners watch the start of the race, because the birds travel as fast as sixty miles per hour and they fly direct, so if the owners watched the start of the race they would probably miss being home to see the birds return. There is no gathering of owners to watch the end of the race, either: everyone wants to see his own flock come back to his own coop. “You hang out in the yard by yourself, waiting,” a pigeon racer recently explained to me. “You put on some music or the baseball game, have a cocktail, and just watch the friendly skies.”

Homing pigeons find their way on instinct, but they need practice. Pigeon racers get up early, because practice sessions—known as “training tosses”—are usually done at dawn, before it’s too hot for flying, and most people drive their birds farther and farther away, several days a week, to build their stamina and to strengthen their attachment to home. The American Racing Pigeon Union oversees two racing seasons each year—one in the spring, for birds more than a year old, and one in the fall, for young birds. The races are held regionally each week, and range from one hundred to six hundred miles. Some races have cash awards for winners—up to several thousand dollars in some cases, and one series of races in South Africa has a purse of a million dollars. But, most of the time, you do it just for the thrill of it, and you get nothing but glory.

There are scores of pigeon breeds, all of them varieties of the rock dove, the bird you see in cities. Fancy breeds—such as pigmy pouters, oriental frills, and short-faced tumblers—are raised for show and for performance. Homing pigeons are raised to race home. Their ability to find their way—and their choice to do so—has been remarked upon since before the Roman Empire. The Egyptians and Turks trained pigeons to carry messages; dynastic China used pigeons to carry mail. It is rumored that Count Rothschild used the early news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, delivered to him by pigeon, to manipulate investments; in the nineteenth century, Paul Julius Reuter founded his news service as a string of pigeon posts; London stock-market quotations were regularly conveyed from London to Antwerp by bird. Pigeons have been used by the German, French, Dutch, English, Belgian, and American armies to carry microfilm and messages. Some military birds conducted surveillance. “If you should ever wake up in the morning and see perched on your window sill an uncanny little bird pointing a miniature camera at you, you might be sure that he was a United States feathered photographer,” Marion Cothren wrote in her book “Pigeon Heroes,” in 1944. “Not to be outdone by Germany, Russia and Japan, our Pigeon Service trained . . . these birds to carry two-inch aluminum cameras attached to their breasts. . . . These clever camera-birds were used to photograph troops or ammunition dumps.” During the Second World War, a pigeon was cited for bravery by the American Army: during a storm, the bird, known as U.S. 1169, carried a distress message to shore from a foundering Coast Guard vessel. Between 1943 and 1949, the Dickin Medal—a British award for animal bravery—was bestowed on thirty-two pigeons, nearly twice the number given to hero dogs.