How to Race Pigeons: The First Training Release

If any of your birds are still not happy with the baskets or seem ill, don’t risk flying them. Better to make sure your pigeons are healthy enough to fly home than to risk flying them because you were impatient. Before training begins, homing pigeons must have their wings sealed (Association rules) and vaccinated against paramyxovirus (legal requirement). Give the birds a practice toss from the other end of your garden, within sight of their loft, just to get them used to being basketed and released. From here they can start to form further away. Your first proper training pitch should be taken about 5 km from the loft and should be as follows:

1. It should take place mid-morning to give them enough time to return home before dark.
2. Fed half their normal rations and no morning exercise. By limiting the amount of food they eat, you will increase their desire to go home.
3. The weather should be clear with light wind and minimal cloud cover.
4. At the release point, remove the basket from your car and place it on the ground. Leave it for about fifteen minutes for your pigeons to calm down and get their bearings. This is a very important step as birds that are released as soon as the basket is placed on the ground will become startled and excited and fly away with no idea where they are.
5. Make sure that in the loft the homing pigeons must enter through the trap.

On your first training flights, you will notice that your racing pigeons will take longer than expected to return home. If you’ve followed my instructions, don’t worry, they’ll come back faster and faster and the number of homing pigeons lost will be minimal (you’ll have to accept, however, that sometimes homing pigeons can get lost and not come back, unfortunately). Keep launching your homing pigeons from this same point until they start to reach the loft on time; at this point increase the release distance by 10 km. When they return in time from this new distance, add another 10 km and so on. When homing pigeons are being trained from 20km onwards, I start introducing them to bad weather by taking them out regardless of the elements (apart from gale force winds, obviously!) because I think it’s a mistake to train homing pigeons just to fly. in the sun. If they are going to encounter all kinds of weather in a racing situation, then I think they should have at least seen something similar before when training!