Drug scandals in pigeon racing have turned the racehorses of the skies into the cyclists of the clouds
A few months ago I found a homing pigeon perched on the battered old bookshelf that stands at the back of our woodshed. The homing pigeon fixed me with a look of kind yet lofty intelligence, and soon I was bringing seeds to it several times a day, like an anxious supplicant tending the shrine of some benign but powerful God.
The racing pigeon stayed in the woodshed for five days, then on the sixth morning, when I went in to fill its food and water dishes, it nodded its head at me several times as if in acknowledgment, took off and, after a couple of cursory laps of the garden to stretch its wings, headed straight eastwards towards the rising sun.
And that, I thought, was the last we would ever see, or hear of the pigeon in the woodshed. Then one bleak morning in January, an unmarked envelope arrived in the post and inside it were ten crisp £20 notes and a sprinkling of linseeds. Actually I made that last bit up. Though I must confess that the thought that such an envelope might unexpectedly pop through the letterbox did sustain me for several weeks during the current chronic economic crisis (or "my life" as I prefer to style it).
Perhaps because of this encounter, I have been singularly gripped by this week's story of a man apprehended at Melbourne airport with a brace of live pigeons hidden in his trousers. An unnamed 23-year-old had wrapped the pigeons in newspaper before tucking one down each leg of track pants before embarking on the 10-hour flight from Dubai. The customs officials became suspicious when they found a pair of pigeon eggs in his pocket and birdseed in his money belt. According to reports an "undeclared aubergine" was also found in the man's holdall.
The exact nature of the pigeons has not been revealed, but members of the pigeon-racing fraternity are braced for the worst. Thus far this has not been a good century for their sport. The number of participants has been falling, more and more birds have been getting lost – confused by mobile phone signals, picked off by falcons, the explanations vary, though perhaps the most persuasive was aired to me by a veteran birdman a few weeks back: "One time when a bird got old you put it in a pie, but these days the young lads just let them go on indefinitely," he said. Part of pigeon-racing's appeal in tougher times was that it was sport you could eat.
Those pigeons that do find their way back home are coming under increased scrutiny. Pigeons are sometimes called "the racehorses of the skies", but given their current habit of attracting scandal these days they seem more like "the cyclists of the clouds".
Doping scandals have proliferated since Belgian police raided lofts in 2001, the difficulty of drug-testing pigeons exacerbated in the UK by the fact that until recently the Royal Pigeon Racing Association had to send samples to South Africa to be tested. Not that drug use is new to the sport. The hope of finding a winning potion means pigeon racing has never been without quacks. The great Belgian writer George Simenon recalled how in the 1920s a chemist in his home city of Liège had perfected a particularly potent pigeon purgative that literally lightened a bird's load during races. Local fanciers used to queue round the block to buy it. Presumably it was less popular with everybody else in Liège, with the possible exception of the dry cleaners.
Belgium, indeed, is well known as the centre for what British enthusiasts tend to refer to as "continental practices". This state of affairs was brought to my attention back in the 1990s when a North-East pigeon-fancier asked if I would pick up some "stuff for the birds" for him while attending a bike race in east Flanders. He knew a Belgian lad, he explained, who had something that could fix the vexed problem of moulting. The trouble with pigeons, he said, is that they shed their feathers during the prime racing months of the season and the fewer feathers they have the slower they fly, but if you just give them a little dose of this stuff...
I envisaged a scene at the customs desk at Newcastle airport in which packets of anabolics, beta-agonists and corticosteroids were laid out in front of me by stern-faced officials, and I was forced to confess that I was acting as mule for a bird. I told the pigeon-fancier I didn't think I could oblige.
Later it crossed my mind that if he really wanted to import illegal pigeon dope, he could get the birds to bring it in themselves. A notion that might be dismissed as whimsical were it not for the fact that in Bosnia prison warders recently apprehended a homing pigeon bringing heroin into a jail near Sbrenica. "We do not know what to do with the pigeon," the deputy warden, Josip Pojavnik, said, "but for the time being it will remain behind bars."
As to the fate of Melbourne's trouser leg pigeons, nothing has so far been heard. Whatever becomes of them, it is to be hoped some suitable punishment will be visited upon the man who abused these fine creatures so cruelly. Personally I'd like to see him tagged, caged and kept in a ramshackle wooden hut next to a railway line for the rest of his life

very interesting ian, we should have more of these pigeon related articles in future maybe as they are amusing and interesting reading.