Some of you may remember at the end of last summer, I built a pigeon coop & bought 6 homing pigeons from Shooterwalter here on the forum. Out of those six birds (had no clue which ones were males & which were females) I ended up with 3 males & three females and they all paired up & started popping eggs like crazy. I have since had 18 babies that hatched & survived, as they have gotten old enough, I have netted them & put them in a settling cage, let em sit out away from the coop for a couple of hours (where they can still see it) then carry the cage back over & open it so they can go in thru the trap door & back into the coop. They all have done great with that so I started letting a few of them out at a time to see if they would come back, they did. Two weeks ago I caught all of my young birds that have gone thru the trap training (14 birds) and let them fly, all but one came back. This weekend I decided, heck with it, the coop is getting a little full so I will just open the main door & let all of them fly, maybe a few of them wont come back & I will have made some room since it's not really worth the time to sell 3 or 4 of them for $6 each. I even let the original adults that I got from Walter go. Everyone said they would bolt, and to be honest, I hoped they would, they didn't. Same thing this time, all but one bird came back (all of the original adult birds came back). Gonna do this 2 more times & It's time to start taking them down the road a bit (I only need them to home from about 12 miles - and I might have found a spot to train that's only about a mile). Gonna sure be nice to be able to grab 10-15 birds & head to the training field without having to cough up $100 each time.

You the man. Great job. You made democrats out of all them.

Congratulations on your good job and glad I was able to help. I am getting some wild pigeons Friday for shooting. I have a client coming with a Boykin Spaniel who wants to work on her retrieveing and we will be using the wild pigeons. I am trying to learn about the Pigeon Shooting conventions that are held sometimes for sporting shooters. I will advise.