updated 2-21-11
The birds came in up through August and we had extreme heat this year which made it hard to get them to fly since I could not fly them early due to work. What I did was give the birds open loft most all summer to get them out flying even if it was up and down without me there. The birds being late hatches seemed to double molt trying to catch up and that made it even harder to get them down the road. I trained the birds out to 50 miles several times and losses were not to bad. Got them on out to 60 and 80 miles not really rushing things and then stopped them. I did have a virus hit the birds this summer but got them through it as good as I could. The adino seems to do what it wants with our pigeons and I believe most of the losses in the one loft races are caused by this virus or some form of it. The birds can look like a million bucks and then they are thin as a rail for days. It seems to just get certain birds and a lot of them survive it but what damage has it done? We had 91 birds of the 116 entered after the first round of training at summers end . I have now started the birds again down the road and most are doing great but lost a few more. Snow storms slowed me down with them a bit. My plan is to give them several short tosses up to 50 miles in small groups to get them thinking better. I will be posting these tosses this week just so you know what we have. My plan is to get them 100 miles by the middle of March again and do a release with other birds since I believe they will get with other birds before this thing is over. Our season starts early April so once we get the birds back to 100 miles you will need to start sending in the entry fees so we can this Race started. The birds look really good and have been coming mostly together but some tosses we drop a bird or two and I just don’t get it. Sometimes we get them back the next day and other times we don’t. I am sure I have made mistakes with these late hatches one way or another , it is new to me as well but we keep moving regardless with 100 % effort to get these birds ready.