Homing Pigeons - Teach Your Birds Come Home!

All right guys we are one mile from the house. Now this is what it's going to look like. You open your box. Let's go up the top two and we're going to allow these pigeons to fly out. Go home birds. Go home. Hi guys Ethan here and we are back with another pigeon video. This is a video by request. We've got a lot of questions about how to teach homing pigeons to come back. Now if you have seen or you haven't seen it's a good idea to watch it again. I'm sure it's going to pop up somewhere. We did a video explaining our coop, how it works, why we did what we did. But today this is more about the birds. So I've got all of our birds boxed up here and what we're going to start with is a little bit of pigeon identification. These are important things to learn as you're training your pigeon. So I grabbed one guy here. This is a younger bird on the edge that's referred to as squeakers. The reason they're called squeakers is because they squeak. This one is headed like I said he's kind of on the edge but is squeaking a little bit. You move him around you can probably hear that squeaking now. They just make a squeaking noise. That's an immature bird. Now this is our trap door up top here. We don't have bobs. I explained why but the main reason is it's easier for birds to come and go. If you have a big issue with predators those one-way bobs are going to kind of let the birds in and keep the birds from flying back out the door. I let ours free come and go when they want and then every evening we close them up. So a young squeaker like this we're going to start by putting them on the platform and letting them go back into the coop. If from this platform they fly around a little bit that's good too but put them up here on the platform show them how to get back in. We've got a couple more in here we'll do the same with. I think I think now another way to be able to tell maturity of a bird is going to be their beaks. All right so these birds look very similar in color and you can tell if you get in here real close you can tell one's beak is whiter than the this portion of their beak is wider than the other. Anybody that knows what that's called throw that in the comments below. Show us how much you know about pigeons but this one you can see it's almost a duller grayer color. This is a young bird in the squeaker or borderline squeaker category. We're going to set him up here on the platform. Good job. Goes back in the coop. This one is going to go back in the box. Let me see if I can find a great example here. This one's a lot better. The older the bird is the more of this will build up on their beak. So that's a little bit of a way to tell aging of your birds. They are doing a little bit of molting this time of year too. Now the rest of these birds I'm going to quick do a sort count here. These birds look good. I'm looking for any other squeakers because we don't want our squeakers to be flying because we're going to teach you how we start our homers from flying. Now this is a really old bird. You can see how much extra there is built up here but that's a great way to age birds. This bird I know is old. I've had this bird for four or five years so definitely a mature bird. Throw him back in here. I call all of the birds hims and hers interchangeably because unless you're really paying attention it is difficult to tell what sex the birds are. When they are dancing around with each other in mating dances and things like that you can tell the males typically puff out and make themselves look big and pretty like in most different animals and the females are a little bit smaller more slender built but for the most part it's fairly difficult unless you're actually watching them try and woo each other. That box looks good. I also am listening. I don't hear anybody squeaking so I think we have oh I hear a squeaker in here. Come on where are you at? Not you. This is it. Is that you up there? Good job. If you have, I think that is it. So if you guys are looking at starting your coop you can pick up pigeons from just about anywhere. Your pigeons are going to be, the question you have to ask yourself is how far do I need these birds to fly? If you're looking within a few hundred yards to a couple miles you can get pigeons from anywhere. If you need that 10, 15, 20 mile range or further you're going to need to get some quality homing pigeons. To find the quality homing pigeons you're going to need to look at there's pigeontalk.net. Those guys are typically into racing and raising different types of pigeons and then there will be some other forums but look for somebody that's actually got racing pigeons and racing lines stock to get the better homing instincts. Then put your birds, you can get mature birds, put them in your coop. Let them live there. Do not let them fly for at least a month. They're going to start raising their own young laying, excuse me, laying eggs and when they begin that process they're going to be calling this area home. Now when you start that open the door to your trap door or let them just outside the coop let them fly around a little bit there and go back in. That's how you're going to start them homing. Let them live there. We're talking a minimum of a month and then let them start homing locally. When they're comfortable with that then you're going to load them up just like these guys. We're going to throw these guys in the back of the truck here and we're going to take them for their big debut. Now my birds have all homed but this is exactly what it would look like once your birds in your coop have been around for at least that two plus month range. All right we've got these guys stacked up. They were ride safe. We're not going far. We're going to start this today with just one mile and after they fly that one mile then we'll be able to push that to two miles and then five miles and then eight to ten miles. You will probably lose a couple birds when you get into that longer range. You're going to find the collection of birds that are going to do a nice job. So to recap we want to make sure we don't have any immature birds. We're going to make sure any birds that we have have lived in the coop and are comfortable homing locally and then we're going to start by building distances gradually. Today we're going to do one mile. Come along with me and I'll show you what this looks like. All right guys we are one mile from the house. Now this is what it's going to look like. You open your box. Let's go up the top two and we're going to allow these pigeons to fly out. Go home birds. Go home. Now if you turn around and take a look here these birds are already circling to our right coming back up over top. They start this circling process so they can get their bearings. They try and figure out which direction they need to go and it'll take them a little bit but after they've done a few homes like this you can let them go 10 miles they'll beat you home. So these guys are circling we're going to let the next box out. All right here they go. Good. Now they're all getting up here together almost instantly. Cool. So these birds are going to like I said circle fly home. We may lose a couple of these younger birds or it may take them a little while to get home but for the most part they're going to be v-lined pretty quick. All right and now we've got the third box and we'll shoo them out as well. Come on birds. Come on birds. Got one more. Go go go buddy. Go go go. Good job. All right so overhead we've got everybody circling. They'll end up working together pretty good and you are going to lose a few especially as you get further distances but the ones that you do retain they're going to do a good job for you. So let's head back to the coop and see if we can catch some of these guys on their way home. All right guys we've already got a couple birds that have made it back. They beat us home. There will be a few more. We'll step out here in a second and look and see if we can catch a few more of them coming in. But the important things to keep in mind here is we've got plenty of daylight left for them to make it home especially on these beginning flights they need some time. As well as we keep nice clean water for them. Plenty of food so that they are comfortable here ready to come back and excited about staying here. Now we've got a couple birds perched up here on top of our little building. They'll do a little bit of that and then they'll be able to finish and coming in. From a racing standpoint this isn't ideal because you need to be able to get a little band off of them but we don't care we're just bird dog trainers. So as long as they make it back in so we can catch them for tomorrow we're happy. Now let's see if we can come around and see a couple more of those birds coming on home. Don't see anybody yet. Here's the one coming. You see him? Straight out 12 o'clock cutting across. There we go. Right there left. Got him coming in. Another bird coming home. Good birdie. It's one of our younger birds too. So these birds are going to continue to trickle back in over probably the next 20-30 minutes. We may have oh we got one coming back in from over on the right and another one coming back in behind me. Those birds are going to continue to trickle back in here but this is how you start your pigeons homing to your coop. We're going to continue to increase the distance on these guys but all in all have fun. 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