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.

10-2-2010

Just a note letting you know that all is well with the birds. They are out flying and are very healthy. It has been extremley hot for the past month and we have added a few new birds as well and still a few more to come. The only problem I have had was one night flight of a few birds because of them getting spooked just as they were going in. I plan to road train the birds this winter on good days and get them out to 100 miles at least. Then they will loft fly and be retrained before old bird season starts in mid April. Hope all of you have a great 2010 Young birds season with your own teams. This has been a tough year with all the heat and many have not been able to do much as far as training . The temps have cooled now for the most part which allows the birds to do more flying . I will soon be seperating the sexes in seperate sections and then letting them out seperatley which will also increase their flying time. That is it for now. Best of luck until next time.

Randy

Hello all  1-10-11

It is January and the birds are doing well and have been trained out to 50 miles. We had hoped to have them further by now but this type of race is a learning experiance for me as well. Recieving birds in mid summer made it tough to get them flying well enough to train because of the exessive heat we had this year and the fact that some of the birds continued to molt well into October for some reason. I might add that health was much harder to deal with this year with late bred birds. Thats OK though we are looking good now and still have 91 birds of the 115 we recieved. The birds were given open loft for several months to help get all of them up and flying. By the time I would get home from work it would be dark so I really had no choice in that . Now the severe winter weather is giving us fits but I will continue to train until i can get them to the 100 mile mark. Then we stop them and resume in March for a second round of training. I will get the chips on the birds as soon as the nasty weather gets out of here mid week and post an inventory. Like I said , this is a bit new for me but we will get there and have a blast.

Randy