Gone

Dave Link lifts the binoculars from his patio table and scans the deep blue sky eastward over his Canyon neighborhood in the Panhandle. Two Eurasian collared doves alight on a nearby utility line. In the gusty wind, a red-tailed hawk soars over the backyard. Link is looking for something else, though—his racing pigeons.

“The key question is, ‘Will mine break from the group?’” Link wonders. “If they go to Amarillo, I’m screwed. They really need to break away at Shamrock.”

Link is president of the Amarillo Pigeon Racing Club and has played this waiting game many times, going back to his childhood in suburban Chicago. But the stakes are high on this Saturday in September. It’s the first race of the “young bird” season, featuring an untested group of pigeons born in the calendar year.

Link checks his phone, looking for news from other club members. His nine pigeons—part of a field of 123 birds—were released two-and-a-half hours earlier in Texola, Oklahoma. Wired with instinctual ability to find their ways home, the birds should complete their more than 100-mile westward journey any minute now. From the release point, the birds fly a direct route to their respective lofts, splitting from the flock as they near their homes.

“What you want is to get a bird in before you get any texts,” Link says.

As if on cue, Link’s phone chirps with news from another racing club member announcing the arrival of a pigeon at their backyard loft. Then another. And another. “Jim always beats me when there’s a headwind,” Link says.

The Amarillo Pigeon Racing Club is one of about 40 such clubs across Texas, according to directories kept by the American Pigeon Racing Union and the Texas Center of Racing Pigeon Clubs. From Odessa to Edinburg and Splendora to Wichita Falls, the clubs are DIY affairs for people who are transfixed by the speed, grace, and utility of racing pigeons. The clubs organize races and shows for their members and promote the sport to younger generations with presentations to groups like 4-H.

Link’s birds took the top three places in the same race in 2023, but the wins are fleeting. For this opening race of the 2024 season, his curiosity about his young birds and the efficacy of his breeding and training outweighs the results.

Minutes later, two sleek pigeons swoop out of the sky and land on the roof of their backyard loft, a shed Link renovated into a comfy home. The birds glance around, then hop down to a platform and enter the loft through a trap door with a sensor that scans their leg band to record arrival times.

“There’s no better feeling,” Link says, “than being here after a race and seeing a bird drop out of the sky, and you think, ‘How did you do that?’”

Pigeon fanciers, the term used for people who raise pigeons, are keeping alive a practice that extends deep into humanity’s past. Domesticated pigeons are descendants of rock doves, and for thousands of years, humans have bred them for various purposes. These include as food, pets, and messengers who carried paper glued to their tail feathers with wax or in canisters attached to their legs or backs. Pigeons’ average flight speed is 40-50 mph—the world’s fastest human, Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, once clocked in at 27 mph.

Breeders have cultivated pigeon bloodlines over millennia to accentuate the homing instinct that guides them miraculously back to their origin points. Numerous studies have sought to determine how pigeons pull off this trick. Most scientists believe they rely on a combination of factors for compass cues, including the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field. Near their loft, they recognize visual landmarks and can even smell home, according to a 2005 study by Charles Walcott of Cornell University.

The birds’ lore goes as far back as the Bible. In the story of Noah’s Ark, Noah sent a raven from the ark to find land after 40 days of rain inundated the Earth. When the raven didn’t return, Noah sent out a dove, as described in Genesis 8:11 from the King James version: “And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the Earth.”

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In her book Pigeons, zoologist Dorothy Hinshaw Patent describes how Aristotle wrote about the Greeks using pigeons as messengers during the fourth century B.C. In 13th-century Baghdad, sultans developed a postal system based on pigeons. When Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, pigeons delivered the news to England four days faster than horses and ships.

The American military has also used pigeons as messengers. The body of one brave WWI pigeon, Cher Ami, is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The exhibit tells the story of Cher Ami surviving a bullet wound to deliver a message on the Western Front. During World War II, 54,000 homing pigeons were employed in the battlefields of Asia, North Africa, and Europe.

Closer to home, U.S. Army troops from Fort Bliss in El Paso used messenger pigeons during Gen. John J. Pershing’s 1916 pursuit of Francisco “Pancho” Villa into Mexico. Texas newspapers also employed pigeons, sending them out with correspondents to deliver news back to the office.

The late W. D. Smithers was a San Antonio photographer and freelance reporter who documented life in far West Texas in the first half of the 20th century. He used pigeons to send news from the Big Bend region to the San Antonio Light newspaper—over 300 miles—during the 1920s. Big Bend locals were suspicious that his pigeons were carrying reports of smuggling activities to authorities. Smithers allayed their concerns by allowing his stories to be read aloud in Spanish at the Castolon Trading Post, now part of Big Bend National Park, before the pigeons were released.

“The pigeon-carried stories were a popular feature in the newspaper, reporting all sorts of news from the Big Bend,” Smithers wrote in his memoir, Chronicles of the Big Bend, “and specially tagged on the front page, with ‘Special by Carrier Pigeon.’ The birds sometimes were pictured alongside the articles.”

The development of new communication technologies, starting with the telegraph and railroads in the 19th century and continuing with radios and telephones in the early 20th century, all but displaced messenger pigeons. To this day, emergency officials in the Indian state of Odisha maintain a carrier pigeon service, according to a recent article in Forbes. When cyclones and floods disable the region’s infrastructure, messenger pigeons soar over the debris.

On the Friday night before the first fall race, members of the Amarillo Pigeon Racing Club gather at the clubhouse to drop off their birds. Set in a residential neighborhood, the one-room garage has a hodgepodge of chairs and a counter strewn with timing equipment. Plaques on the walls recall the winners of past races. A framed charter from the American Pigeon Racing Union—a confederation based in Oklahoma City of approximately 700 clubs and 7,500 members—bears the Amarillo club’s founding date of Sept. 24, 1961.

As the utility of messenger pigeons waned,
fanciers in groups like the Amarillo club have maintained the practice, drawn by the challenge of breeding and training carrier pigeons to maximize their speed and endurance. The club members greet each other jovially as they prepare for the race. Only six people are entering birds today, but most of the club’s 14 members show up to help.

“It’s the camaraderie and the relationships that keep us going,” says John Somerville, who joined the club in the early 1970s. Following a recent storm, he says, club members volunteered their time, labor, and money to repair the clubhouse’s roof, sheetrock, and grounds.

The club organizes about 10 races in the spring and 10 in the fall, with distances increasing as the season continues. Most of the races are for bragging rights, but the club holds a special competition in the fall with a $500 purse. The fall races are for young birds; the spring ones for old birds, meaning birds that are at least one year old. The races max out at 350 miles for young birds and 500 miles for old. Pigeons don’t typically race past 5 years old.

“I’ve always been intrigued by the strength and intelligence of the birds,” Somerville says. “I’ll sit in my backyard and watch my birds and see the things they’re doing, and that’s how you learn to take care of them and respond to their needs.”

When it’s time to “basket” the birds for transportation to the release point, each racer brings in his pigeon cage. A strict set of rules keeps the race orderly and fair. A club member other than the bird’s owner handles each bird, one by one, as the chip ring on its leg is scanned to link it with the timing equipment. Then the birds are placed for the night in a custom 12-foot trailer with compartments to haul the pigeons to the release point the next morning. After the race, the club’s secretary reports the results to the American Pigeon Racing Union.

The club members work various day jobs, from agriculture to manufacturing to law enforcement. They’re all animal lovers, and most of them started as kids when older family members or friends gave them pigeons to keep. Robert Hernandez, the club’s vice president, was introduced to raising pigeons by a mentor when he was a fifth grader in Canadian. “He gave me some birds and took me under his wing,” Hernandez says. “We would just do it for fun, never any competition to it.”

A few years ago, Hernandez got back into raising birds but with his wife, Lotte, the club’s secretary. They started like most fanciers, by buying birds from local club members and professional breeders. Now they breed their own while occasionally acquiring a proven winner to enhance their flock’s genetic lines. The Hernandezes converted an old playhouse into a loft in their backyard in Canyon. They train their birds by taking them out for practice flights, increasing the distances as the pigeons grow stronger, faster, and smarter. Out of caution, Hernandez isn’t entering his young birds in the opening race of the season. “You don’t want to rush them,” he says.

Still, on the Saturday morning of the race, Hernandez rises early and drives east on Interstate 40 to the Oklahoma border to watch the start. Hernandez was a professional bull rider as a young man, with two plates and 10 screws in his right hip to prove it. These days, he also trains thoroughbred racehorses. Yet it’s pigeons that keep him up at night.

“Sometimes I feel like pigeons are more aggravating than horses because they can be an emotional roller coaster,” Hernandez says. “I’ve tried to learn to let them do their thing, to quit trying to make it happen and just let it happen.”

Arriving in Texola, Hernandez and club member Gerardo Lechuga, who’s towing the pigeon trailer, find an open pasture along a country road near I-40 just as the sun is lifting from the horizon. Lechuga pours water into troughs for the pigeons to get a last drink before the race. A chorus of coos rises from the trailer. The birds are ready to fly.

At 8 a.m. sharp, the two men open the trailer gates and, like a blast from a confetti gun, the pigeons take flight. The slap of their wings fills the air as they elevate and gather into two flocks. The flocks make two large circles and merge together as they orient themselves westward and sprint to the horizon. Within seven seconds, they’re out of sight.

“Boy,” Hernandez says. “They got going quick!”