Racing home

People often have the same reaction when Calvin Gall tells them about his hobby: “You do what?”

“A lot of people don’t know about it,” Gall said.

Pigeon racing isn’t in the realm of woodworking, painting and gardening when it comes to leisure activities, Gall has been involved in it for more than 30 years, and he loves it.

He has about 30 birds in what he calls “racing lofts” in his backyard. Twenty are training to race and went on a flight from the Washington County Fair Park to their home on Monday, covering 20 miles in 33 minutes.

Races entail pigeons being taken to a place where they are all released at once and fly to their respective homes. Winners are determined via GPS by birds’ average speeds since their owners live in different cities and race distances may vary by several miles.

An overall winning bird is named, as well as the team with the fastest average speed of all of its birds.

Timing is determined similar to human races. The pigeons wear little electric bands on one of their legs and cross a small computerized pad at the entrance of their loft that logs their time. Race times go to the thousandths of a second.

“You can lose a race by a second,” Gall said.

Pigeon racing started in the early 1800s in the country of Belgium — Gall thought it fitting he moved to the Town of Belgium from Grafton a couple of years ago — and became useful during war when birds carried messages on their legs. During World War II, the Allies planned to bomb a position not knowing their forces already secured it. A pigeon named G.I. Joe delivered a message to call off the planes, Gall said.

“Their roles in the first two world wars were pretty big. People just don’t know it,” Gall said. “There were birds who saved a lot of lives.”
Gall got interested in pigeon racing through his father Richard, who got into the hobby through his father, who kept birds on his farm in Marshfield.

The hobby was popular after soldiers came home from war ­— 78 people were in Gall’s father’s club and the president of the national association lived in Milwaukee — but it’s not being picked up as much by new generations, Gall said.

Gall, however, barely knows life without his birds.

He is training his team of 20 for two 300-mile races in September. One starts in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and the other in Blue Earth, Minn. He adds 10 miles to his pigeons’ training races nearly every day, then adds 100 miles in the last couple of weeks.

Gall doesn’t drive his feathered flock to the destination — the club hires someone to do that — so he waits at home on pins and needles.

“The enjoyment of seeing the birds come back — for me it’s a thrill,” he said. “I still get goosebumps, still do.”

Gall eventually wants to enter his team in the Midwest National Classic Old Bird Race, a 500-mile competition starting in Topeka, Kan. He competed in the race once when he lived in Grafton. The birds were released at 6:15 a.m. and he didn’t expect to see any come home until the next day due to a headwind.

It was 8:30 p.m. when he eyed one of his racers flying in after 14 hours of airtime.

“When I saw that bird my legs were shaking,” Gall said. “I couldn’t even whistle. That was one of the most exciting moments.”

People haven’t figured out how the birds know to come home, but they do. Mothers with eggs or babies in their nests have special motivation to get home.

“Scientists don’t even know. Cornell (University) studied it,” Gall said. “A lot of people think it’s the magnetic field of the earth.”

With a tailwind, pigeons can reach speeds of nearly 70 mph, Gall said. The average is about 50 mph and the state record is 2,800 yards per minute — how pigeon speed is measured —or 95 mph.

Once the birds start to race, they fly the entire way.

“They just go. If they go down for water or food, they’re not going to win,” Galls said.

“They are some of the toughest animals I’ve ever seen. I’ve had some come home with severed wings.”

On occasion, some birds get lost and others get eaten by peregrine falcons or hawks. That got worse since the government protected the predators, Gall said.

Pigeon training and nutrition is similar to non-feathered two-legged athletes. Racing pigeons get a mix of corn, wheat and sunflower seeds, and their diet increases in fat closer to race day.

Breeding birds get a mix of soybeans and different kinds of peas. All birds get grit with oyster shells and vitamins and minerals to help with digestion.

Before the race, birds get carbohydrates and fat since they’ll burn it up flying home. Electrolytes and vitamins are put into their water to keep them hydrated.

After they return home, a protein powder is added to their food to help build their muscles.

The racers also receive probiotics, and they appreciate their day-after-race baths in a big bin of water.

“They just dive in there. They love it,” Gall said.

As in horse racing, breeding is big in pigeon racing. Birds come with pedigrees, and DNA testing is done in Europe to prove who a birds’ parents are. One of Gall’s birds’ sons just won a race in South Africa and got $35,000.

“To have the mother is pretty exciting,” he said.

Races can cover 100 to 150 miles for sprints, 200 to 300 miles for mid-distance and 500-plus miles for marathons. Birds’ sizes, much like humans in track and field, fit their categories. Sprinters are bigger with large muscles and marathoners are very small, Gall said.

Gall spends about 20 minutes tending to his birds each morning, then an hour to 90 minutes each night after his job in Waukesha as a 911 dispatcher. Racing pigeons get fed early in the day and at 7 p.m.

His children, Mikayla, 9, and Jeremiah, 5, like to help take care of the birds and name them, and his wife Jamie supports her husband’s passion and asked that he put in bird feeders for the common flocks in their backyard.

“She thinks of them as pets, almost,” he said of the pigeons.

Birds live to be an average of 12 years old. Gall said one of his reached 17.

The cost of the hobby can run the gamut, depending on the type of food and birds. Gall gets many of his pigeons from Europe that are required to stay in quarantine for a while before being released. He keeps his new residents in a separate building for a few weeks to ensure they don’t have any diseases. He vaccinates all his birds twice per year to prevent paramyxovirus, or PMV, a deadly pigeon disease with no cure.

Pigeon racing picking up in China where money is getting big for birds with the best genes, and it is still popular in Europe, Gall said. The most prestigious race, the Barcelona International, covers 900 miles and draws more than 15,000 birds. The winning bird of that race, Gall, said is worth 100,000 euros.

For more information on pigeon racing, visit pigeon.org.