Beijing pigeons not birds of a feather in NYC

Like clockwork, a flock of pigeons zooms past my apartment window every morning flying wingtip-to-wingtip like a squadron of fighter planes. These fast fliers never land to scavenge for bread crumbs like the dirty birds that foul the sidewalks and drop white "pigeon bombs" on your head back home in New York City. Why?

"There are no wild pigeons in Beijing," says Zhang Hui, director of the Haidian Racing Pigeon Club. How nice, I think, to live in a city where pigeons are pets, not pests.

"When you see a pigeon, all your troubles disappear," says Tian Guomao, a cheerful club member paying his 20 yuan ($2.93) registration fee for a pigeon race the next day. He carries 16 sleek racing pigeons in a wooden crate. Each bird wears plastic rings on its ankles. One ring holds a computer chip. The other is an ID band.

Beijing pigeon racing has gone high-tech.

After registering the birds on the computer, a white-gloved pigeon handler smoothes their feathers and places them carefully in smaller cages, stacked up on special pigeon trucks. By the end of the day, more than a thousand pigeons will be loaded up and driven 300 kilometers to Hebei Province for the start of the race... They will fly home to Beijing in under four hours, with an average speed of 60 kilometers an hour.

The bird owners have electronic landing pads in their pigeon lofts to record the flight time.

With a tailwind, these Olympic fliers can hit a top speed of 100 kilometers an hour. Mr Tian's pigeons literally raced in the 2008 Olympics and on National Day when they were released with thousands of others in the Bird's Nest and in Tiananmen Square.

"A great honor," he smiles.

The race carries cash prizes up to 2,000 yuan ($293) – not much money when you consider that a top-flight pigeon can sell for more than 6 million yuan ($878,657) at auction. To me, this suggests some heavy side betting on the races.

Mr Tian has groomed his feathered athletes with a special diet of ground beans, sunflower seeds and medicine sold at a pigeon pharmacy in the parking lot. He Jixiang, a "pigeon doctor," even sells fake pigeon eggs to fool hens into thinking they are hatching chicks: "It saves their strength for the race."

Some members who have lost pigeons recently think cell phone towers may be interfering with the bird's navigation instinct.

Mr Tian suspects foul play. If a bird lands for a drink of water, somebody with a pigeon net may "cook it for lunch."

That could be a million dollar lunch.

Source: Global Times