At a time when numbers participating in "pigeon Racing" is in decline. it is great when you see past fanciers return to the flock. One such fancier is Ray Whitmore of Campbelltown Sydney.
I first met Ray when he began to frequent the Campbelltown Club. At that time I thought Ray had never kept pigeons before as he was very quiet and content to watch and listen closely to what was going on. Slowly Ray would start to ask individual members the odd question and would listen intently to what was said, absorbing as much information as he could. He was, and still is a good listener.
It wasn't till much later that I realised that Ray had kept racing pigeons before. What I admired about Ray at this time, was that was astute enough to realise that pigeon racing had changed since his last involvement and that for him to become competitive in a short period of time he had to bring himself up to speed with modern techniques and management in a very short period of time. To Ray's credit he has not only done this, but done extremely well. His results more than demonstrate this.
Ray has made a point of befriending and/or conversing with as many top fanciers as time permits. He has also spent many hours "surfing the net" all with the aim of learning as much as he could and to-date this has paid excellent dividends.
Both Ray and his wife Mira, deserve the success that they have already achieved since their return to the sport. (A list of their achievements since returning to the sport is included at the end of the article).
To obtain an outline of this "dynamic duo's" return to the sport, I asked Ray to address a list of questions I gave him, to which the answers make up the remainder of this story.
In his own words, it's now over to Ray: I suppose that my experience in racing whippets for fifteen years gave us a running start when we decided to race pigeons. Different animals, but the basics are the same. Let me indulge and skite a little here. I was fortunate enough to train three Australian champions competing against the best whippets in Australia. As ironic as it may be, I used to race against noted Victorian flyer Grenville Evans. Grenville used to stay at our house when he competed for the championships at Harold Park.
Now back to the pigeons. At the time of taking up the sport I was living in a flat. I worked two minutes walk to the timber yard where I was employed on the corner of Benaroon Road and Lakemba Street, Belmore. The owner of a fruit shop next door to the yard was a pigeon flyer named Les Pratt.
Les raced with the Greenacre club. Les and his wife had worked seven days a week for years and had finally made enough to build a house at Moorebank. He offered my brother Frank and I some of his pigeons as he knew we were keen on them. Living in a flat made it impossible to have pigeons, so I reluctantly declined his offer. I was then confronted by my boss about my decision.
He said "look we have a huge block of land, there is timber and fibro everywhere, build a loft and race your pigeons". You could have knocked me over with a flight feather. So our first loft was 2.5 meters off the ground on the roof of a storage shed. Brother Frank and I raced with Greenacre club in 1970, 1971 and 1972. In the meantime, my original employer sold the business, although we still raced the pigeons.
After the third year of flying, we had progressed from easy beats to becoming very competitive. If memory serves me right, we won the short series and the overall point score for the season. My original boss called me up and offered me a job at his new mill in Smithfield, I told him I was happy where I was with my pigeons. He added that I would be foreman, and I would be earning double the pay I was getting. I made a financial decision to part with my pigeons.
In 1997 I survived two heart attacks, surgery was required to get the old ticker back up to speed and as a consequence it took six bypasses to get me back on track. the heart disease forced me into premature retirement. I was making fishing lures and got bored with it. I suggested to my best mate, who was also my wife that we should race pigeons for something to do. Her reaction shocked me as she was even keener than I was. So here we are racing pigeons after thirty five years.
Our racing loft consumes a fair bit of the yard, its seven meters by 2.5 meters, by 1.8 meters. It has a flat roof with air vents at the top and bottom of the back wall. We fly open door. The electronic timing system is a bit out of the reach of the average pensioner. I scrounged timber and iron whenever I could and went to auctions to get building materials as cheaply as possible, and I built the pigeon housing myself.
Who helped my wife and I get established? How much space have we got? First and foremost, the person most responsible for the success of the team is my wife, Mira.
They say that most top pigeon flyers have a supportive and helpful hands-on wife behind them. I have truckloads of that, my wife loves the pigeons and is so keen. When I lose she does not care. It's just being in the yard with the birds on race day Saturday and club tossing on Sunday. Mira would trade any win for 100% return of the birds. She cleans lofts, loads pigeons, feeds, she can do the lot. I am a very lucky man. Phil Murphy wants to buy her.
Brother Frank had a big bearing on our re-entry into the sport. I was going all gung-ho and a hundred miles an hour, he was a steadying influence and kept hammering into my head "keep it simple, stupid". He bred us a big winner last year and another one already this year that topped the Fed.
Phil Murphy has been very influential in our training and health programs. Phil unselfishly shared his knowledge, gleaned from years of experience. Even though we were future rivals and competitors, Phil answered any question and even showed us everything we wanted to know, he has been a great supporter and friend.
Keith Saggers. I had a bug in the birds at the start of the season. All remedies, cures, concoctions and snake oils failed to remedy the problem. In desperation I rang Keith Saggers, whom at that stage I had never met or seen. I introduced myself, stated that I was a new flyer, 1 explained my problem, and then asked for help. Keith asked a series of questions about the symptoms of the birds; loft size, population density and ventilation. In five minutes, Keith diagnosed the problem and prescribed the proper medication, fixed a flaw in loft design and on the road to be a winning team in only three weeks. He's a shy, rough looking bloke, that Saggers, but a nice bloke, very astute, knowledgeable and helpful. When in you are in Keith's company you don't talk, you just listen and you will learn something. Normally if you get off to a bad start your season is shot, not with Keith, he saved our season.
Jason Stigg has been a great supporter; Jason helped put together our feeding system. The change in the birds was dramatic and immediate, with the feeding system recommended by him.
Blood lines kept are basically Janssens. We have Van Loons, Smeulders and the Marilyn line through descendants of three of her sons. Here I must mention two other people that have played prominent role in our success. Above all else you must have good pigeons, our combine winners pedigree is punctuated with Mike and Dianne Mussett's imported cock's blood. They imported Scherpe GB-92-45533, a grandson of Marilyn. He was by NL-89-2559705. He was a full brother to the Marilyn son in Australia GB-88-12007. Mike astutely purchased a granddaughter of 12007 to mate the Scherpe; three cocks from this mating were kept for stock. Mike had My Boy PUN-94-00083; Mark Jeffrey's had PUN-93-0004. These two brothers sired over twenty winners between them. Their sons and daughters bred winners. Mike and Di then purchased another hen from another branch of the Marilyn line and struck gold again. This hen when mated to Scherpe produced PUN-02-1239, making her a half-sister to the two champion cocks above. I his hen when mated to a grandson of My Boy via his winning son Old 78 produced CTN-04-1102; he won Moruya combine, beating 6,500 pigeons. It gets better; a full brother to the cocks of Mike and Mark was mated to a half-sister of the combine winner with only one of the progeny of that pairing to race. She homed one minute behind the combine winner; she was timed in to win a pied bird race; she could have won club section and fourth prize in the combine. Great pigeons. Thanks to Mike and Di we started racing pigeons on a very good foundation.
A little bit on the training methods. For the southern route the birds were exercised twice daily for thirty minutes duration, exercise duration extended as the race distance increased. I do not believe in feeding the birds a mix that is too heavy. I feed a light mix most of the week and this keeps the birds high away from the loft, working fast most of the time. I introduced the birds to what I call 'combat food' on different days of the week for the different distances raced, peas are fed at moderate levels as they contain only low levels of digestible protein. We always feed our pigeons as much as they want; we just change the ratios of the for in diet the buoyancy the average seasonal velocities. To adjust the buoyancy of the birds barley is a great grain. We incorporate rest in our training program; we train them hard but keep them fresh.
Medications. I believe that pigeons today need to be medicated. Birds are constantly subjected to stress, the precursor to sickness and disease. Fanciers keep more and more pigeons each year to cover any losses in initial training and education tosses. We breed a few more for the falcons. Then we cram all these birds into lofts designed for far fewer pigeons, I have seen so many lofts that have been overcrowded Your pigeons are only as healthy as the unhealthiest birds they will share a basket with, the longer the exposure, the greater the risk of disease. We leave nothing to chance and medicate against respiratory E-Coli, Coxy and Canker, these are the most common form killers. I just mentioned falcons above. Our combine winner is the only pigeon that we have saved or stitched after falcon attacks, that was worth a cracker. We put over twenty stitches in him, so they feed and water wouldn't leak out of his crop, he now resides in the stock loft. He only had three races; in the first he was five minutes behind our clock bird at his next start, he was three minutes behind his loft mate who was a winner, at his third start he won the Combine. The Combine win is something that my wife Mira and I will treasure for the rest of our lives; it was the pinnacle of an unbelievable first season for us. With the help through advice from the people mentioned elsewhere in this article, we achieved, what we thought was pie in the sky stuff. We won six races last year; we thought that a couple of cards would have been nice. Our success continues in 06. We had a bit of luck to win the second Redhead and top the Fed with this pigeon bred by my brother Frank.
Of the seven races we have won, our strike rate in the top fifty has been extraordinary our pigeons have placed thirty-fourth, twenty-third, fifteenth, fourth, second, first and first Fed. This is the end result of a lot of reading and study, good pigeons, good people and their willingness to help by sharing with us their pigeons and knowledge.
It's interesting to note that Ray has also taken an active involvement in the administration of the sport as well, being a member of both the Club and Federation General Committee.
I would like to thank Ray for his time in detailing his story so far. I feel that his story is just beginning.
Ray's Fed Topper
Author: Paul Gibbs 2006