Holidays, phones and pigeons, by Marius Nicolae

Holidays, phones and pigeons

What is the connection between these three things? Apparently none. But let's think a little.

Pigeon’s orientation

One of the newest idea, related to this issue, is INFRASOUNDS. Those ultralow frequency sounds, generated by seas and oceans, not audible by the human ear, that birds can “hear” from hundreds of kilometers.

As we know, terrestrial magnetism helps the pigeon to set the North direction, but compassing is not enough to navigate. There is also a need for a map.

Relief and infrasound

Continuity of infrasound intensity is disturbed by relief forms. Thus pigeons are able to hear these discontinuities and create an acoustic map. It's like navigating an ocean of sounds, from discontinuity to discontinuity (sonic beacons). It is already known that pigeons do not fly in a straight line to the loft, but follow patterns. These are just the sonic beacons they learned during the training.

But the longest discontinuities of the relief are motorways and highways. It is noticed how pigeons fly over them, but they do not follow these visually, but acoustically. They follow these discontinuities, because they have learned that they lead them home.

Pigeons fly over the roads even when it's cloudy and do not see the ground.

Pigeon losses

Most One Loft races have recorded massive bird’s losses, often from relatively small distances.

Most OLRs train their pigeons during the week, and the races take place over the weekend. Surprise or not, there are massive losses at the end of the week.

Some have tried to change the day of race and release birds on Friday, hoping to minimize intersections with other pigeon flocks. The results were surprisingly good.

But things were not the same on this Friday. Why? The holiday started earlier.

The heat, holidays and smart phones

Something has changed, over the past few years, in connection with the pigeon sport losses. And this will get bigger in the future.

What could change the magnetic field so much? The answer is simple: something that has developed tremendously, on last period: smart phones.

The heat hits the pigeons more indirectly. The heat pulls people out of the houses, climbs them into cars, and heads them to the sea or the mountains. The roads, those landmarks for our pigeons, become true electromagnetic traps, because of the very large number of smart phones that operate there, at the same time. And we are getting more and more hurry, we hurry to catch the last square meter of the sand or the last ray of sunshine. So, we cannot be wrong, and for that we have to use phones as GPS, too.

Pigeons confusion is immense. It's like someone would change, every day, the orientation and color of the houses on the street where you live. You will no longer recognize anything.

This confusion overlaps the normal stress generated by a race and over the other health problems, and the losses quickly become very high.

The above are just my own theory, but we should check them out. Not only weather should be checked before the race. Heat and wind were and will always be. But the losses seem to be getting bigger, despite all our help given to pigeons, by diet, medicines, and so on.

It seems that medicine cannot keep up with the evolution of technology. We are in a vicious circle. We treat more and more with medications or supplements (as some fanciers like to say) more and more sophisticated, and the result is getting worse.

So logically, we should try to see where the real problem is. Otherwise, in a short time, these medicines will eliminate the last gram of immunity from the body of pigeons.

I think that the pigeons who are still good in these conditions, even they are raced in OLRs or in the national competitions, are the ones who have had fewer treatments, thus having a strong immune system that helps them confront confusion and arrive to the correct flight direction.

Therefore, before setting the pigeons race date, we should also check the people "migration" to the sea or to the mountains, especially during the extended holidays as this weekend.

Good luck to everybody!