The Great Pigeon Caper

 

Last Saturday this cool looking bird arrived on our patio. We do like to feed all sorts of wildlife and the daily happy hour event has included some neat animals over the years, but never what we thought was a city pigeon ... they just don't frequent the woods a lot.

So, as we had a ready supply of peanuts we offered this guy one and he took it and some water readily and seemed to be very happy to be a permanent house guest. OK. Google time.

He had a band and I took some pictures of it to see what numbers we could glean from that, still assuming a generic banded city pigeon. Wrong on all accounts. After comparing published numbers we found that this was not your ordinary city bird but a thoroughbred racing pigeon. The Canadian Pigeon Racing Union www.crpu.ca has an excellent website and it described this as a bird that might be lost from the Guelph organization.

I contacted those folks from their website and got an immediate response saying that he was indeed missing from home after a race and could probably use water and food which we provided. They did say that we might try to catch it and someone might be able to come to the KOA and fetch it. Guelph is about 60 miles away so we attempted to catch the wayward avian.

"Here birdy birdy"  Not likely. As I tried to entice it into the cat carrier it flew up to the top of the RV and watched us until we put the carrier away.

From Sunday until Wednesday the animal was a part of our porch and enjoyed the thistle food and occasional chopped up peanut and water and became a really neat part of our afternoon life. Yeah, I know the jokes about the old guys feeding pigeons in the park ... actually we did try popcorn on him but that was a yuk. Also not so good was some pigeon/dove feed ... no one would touch that stuff; other birds, chipmunks, or even the obnoxious red squirrel who eats any and everything.

On Wednesday afternoon we noticed the creature had not been there for a while and then I got an email from the senior official at the CPRU saying that number 084 had returned to his home coop. In all the websites they had said that sometimes these racing birds get thirsty and disoriented and Saturday was a very hot day and when they were rested up they would go home ... absolutely amazing piece of nature we had never been exposed this closely to and we learned a lot about this animal and the organizations that raise, care for, train, and enjoy their competitive nature ... cool!