James H. Cagle
On three separate occasions I raised a homing pigeon from a young chick, whose eyes were not yet opened, to a full grown pigeon that would fly from wherever he was to my shoulder, whenever I whistled.
I did this by climbing up in the tobacco barn, before we started cooking tobacco in the spring, and taking a baby pigeon from the nest, which was high up in the rafters. I then kept it in a box in the house. I fed it warm grits with an eye dropper and, later, bird seed. When it came time to feed it, I blew on it to replicate the wind its mother would have made with her wings when she landed in the nest with food. This caused him to automatically open his mouth. Then I whistled with a long and loud shrill as I fed him. That way he grew up associating the whistle with getting food.
After I raised and trained him to come when I whistled, I could let him go outside. At night he would sleep in a tree somewhere close to the house or on a rafter of the porch. When I came out of the house, my pigeon would fly down and land on my shoulder. If I made it out to the field before he noticed, he would fly over once he saw me. But all three pigeons eventually disappeared. One day they didn’t come when I whistled. I think maybe the owls got them, or they got shot during dove season. It’s also possible that they just eventually went off with their own kind.
My daddy raised and kept homing pigeons. Homing pigeons are also called mail pigeons, messenger pigeons or carrier pigeons because of their ability to find their way home over great distances. The homing pigeon has an innate homing ability, meaning, that it will generally return to its nest (or home) using magnetoreception.
My daddy knew others who raised homing pigeons, and they raced their pigeons against each other. A member of the group would get several pigeons from each participant. Next, he would take the pigeons to some far off place and turn them all loose at the same time. He would then call back to the owners, letting them know the pigeons had been turned loose. They would write down the time and then watch for their pigeons. The one whose pigeons made it home first was the winner.
Homing pigeons were used in WWI and WWII. They were raised at Army headquarters then taken to the battlefield and released with messages tied to their legs, which they would carry back to headquarters.
There are many people that still have homing pigeons and continue to race them today.
