Life in the North East of England (43)
Rod Adams
I heard a joke the other day about a cure for baldness. Scientists have apparently discovered that if they inject a male Brown or Black Rat with steroids it produces a forty fold increase in hair growth and in no time at all you have a rat looking like a cross between a floor mop and a Highland Cow. The only problem is in getting it to stay still on your head! In other words, what use is anything if it doesn’t have a practical application? Theories are fine, but they don’t put the bread on your plate and pigeon racing is saturated with such so-called theories. Mostly being put forward by people who are either making money out of them or who are on some kind of ego trip. Think about it. Do these people live in the real world? If you had a system of gambling or playing the lottery that really worked you would keep it to yourself wouldn’t you, no way would you peddle it about all over the place! Anyway, how much money do these people want? A little more than you absolutely need would do for most of us. Why turn what is essentially a simple sport into a complicated one by reading into it what either isn’t there or isn’t necessary for success?
We have a bewildering mixture of preventatives, cures, pills, potions, powders, feed supplements and all manner of unnecessary products being offered to us at every turn, so what is the new starter and there won’t be many of those, to think? That these will make second rate birds into first rate ones? The best way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your wallet! You simply need good pigeons and a method to suit the time and money you have available for the particular job you want to do with your birds. Football is a simple game too. It is the people who talk about it and make money out of it who complicate it, not the guys who actually play, even though some of them are also making a very good living out of it. You don’t need a university degree to be a good footballer. Far from it. Ability will do fine. Good able pigeons and to hell with all the theories and quackery. As for me? At 68 I am losing my hair, but when it finally goes, no way do I wear a Brown Rat on my head. I shall have my bald pate covered in tattoos of Rabbits instead. From a distance they will look like Hares!
Semantics. Not, I would think, a word used an awful lot by pigeon men but semantics were high on the agenda last night as my clubmates and I debated endlessly about the meaning of words. In particular the use of the word “easy” as opposed to the word “difficult.” Let me explain. We were discussing , comparing really, the various routes flown by pigeons in the United Kingdom and the types of pigeons these routes will eventually produce according to the demands or otherwise of the Geography of the terrain they have to fly over. I used the word “easy” when describing the route we fly here in the North East and the word “hard” when describing what the Irish boys have to overcome. My friends took objection to this on the grounds that it devalued the performances of our birds here in the Up North Combine, saying that it would be better to say that other areas were “more difficult” as opposed to saying our route was “easy”. Semantics, but I do take his point.
No way would I run down The Up North Combine. Like most fanciers who belong to that organisation I consider it the best there is but you have to be realistic when looking at the racing scene in Great Britain. Here in the North East the land is quite flat, we have no mountains, no Peregrine Falcons to speak of and our sea-crossing occurs at the start of the channel races and not at the end when the birds are tired. We are not racing across the full width of the country either, but into a corridor. That is just how it is. It is where I live and where I race. I don’t have any choice and that applies to all but a notable handful of fanciers in this country. If I had the option of competing in any organisation in the British Isles I know exactly where I would want to be, within that organisation, to stand the best chance of winning it. And I know exactly which organisation I would choose to be in. Words are the source of all misunderstandings so let me make it plain. It would not be in Northern Ireland!
It was quite a night because no sooner had we agreed a choice of words which satisfied everyone when I found myself, as usual, on opposite sides of the fence in the next discussion. Fuelled no doubt, by all the beer that had passed down our collective throats! I refer to intelligence in pigeons. Some fanciers being convinced that pigeons, or at least some of them, possessed it while I was championing my “bundle of reflexes” theory. “If they had any intelligence” I told my audience “they wouldn’t bother coming home from the races. They would think that we were trying to get rid of them every Saturday by sending them away. Besides, what thinking organism would spend most of it’s life flying around in circles for a living?” The bulls spotted the red rag, and they were off ,quoting many examples of so-called intelligent behaviour in birds that they had owned or knew about.
This is what is called “Anthropomorphism.” The fallacy of describing or interpreting the actions of animals, other than man, in terms of human actions and mental processes and I was having none of it! As for the actual word “intelligence?” Well it’s best avoided altogether when discussing animal behaviour. Substituting instead say the term “insight learning” which can be defined as a “sudden adaptive re-organisation of experience” but even then the existence of this type of learning is difficult to establish in pigeons. Although it may well occur. Intelligent or not I love my birds. Almost as much as I love a good argument with my contemporaries!
I have always maintained that I am exactly the right weight for my shape so when I was asked if my wife ironed my T- shirts over a Wok I was a bit put out. I am not that fat! Anyway, an empty sack won’t stand up and you need a bit of extra weight in reserve for the hard times that may lie ahead. It’s called “Winter Fat” in horses. That is my story and I’m sticking to it. We have a saying in these parts that whenever you see a fat successful pigeon man, you can bet your money that he has a skinny partner somewhere who does all the cleaning out and running about! Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Extra weight on the fancier might well be acceptable but on the pigeon it certainly isn’t. Weight kills. You often see powerful, fat shot-putters or discus throwers, not to mention Sumo Wrestlers, but there aren’t any fat runners. Sprinters or marathon men. Think power/ weight ratios, as opposed to speed/ stamina ones.
If you consider the term “Wing Loading” you are doing no more than looking at the total weight that has to be carried by the available wings. This is where the size of the bird, how much keel it has, and whether it is carrying more weight than it’s wings can efficiently support come into the equation. Fixed -Wing Gliders are probably more efficient now than they were when I first looked into this aspect of flight, due I would guess, to more modern materials and design, but I seem to remember a maximum wing loading of 9 lbs. per square foot. With a more general loading of about 5lbs.This is for a man made machine. But when you consider the special adaptations birds have evolved for flight i.e. hollow bones (in a Frigate Bird with a five foot wing span the feathers actually weigh more than the skeleton), one working ovary, air sacs etc., it stands to reason that they need extra weight like they need a hole in the head. And neither do we! The thing about diets is that they always start tomorrow. If anyone is interested that is when mine starts too!