No one is exactly sure how the birds do it. Scientists have been studying homing pigeons for decades; at Cornell, experiments have been conducted on them since 1967. Inertial routing—the theory that the birds register the physical experience of the journey and retrace it—cannot entirely account for their ability. Nor can navigation by sight (pigeons fitted with translucent contact lenses are still able to find home); sun-compassing (pigeons can find their way home on overcast days); smell; sound; infrasound; telepathy; or magnetic sensitivity. Many biologists now believe that pigeons use some combination of these. The sentimental explanation is that if pigeons like where they live they use all their animal instincts—which are beyond our capacity to measure—to find their way. Sedona believes that magnetism has something to do with it, but she mostly subscribes to this notion. “I believe it’s the love of the loft,” she told me. “They return to where they feel is their home.”
Occasionally, birds get lost. They might be blown off course and can’t correct themselves. Cell-phone transmissions are suspected of interfering with their steering. In 1998, about fifteen hundred birds competing in a race from Virginia to Pennsylvania went off course; more than half of them were never seen again, and no one knows why they went astray. At a St. Peter’s Fiesta on the north shore of Massachusetts a few years ago, someone released a hundred white pigeons, assuming that they would make a nice addition to the event and would head back home immediately. Weeks after the fiesta ended, the birds were still fluttering around the area, lost and disoriented. One of Sedona’s favorite pigeons, Soleil, went missing after a training toss. Sedona says she thinks she’s seen him a few times since then, wandering the streets of downtown Boston. Her birds are so attached to her that they will come when she calls, but Soleil seemed to have found a new home.
Most of the time, though, homing pigeons can be counted on. Last fall, I went with Matt Moceri on a training toss with a few dozen of his birds and those of some pigeon-racing friends. He was planning to let the birds go in a parking lot in Greenfield, Massachusetts, about a hundred miles away. It was soon after sunrise when we arrived. There was an emu ranch next to the parking lot, and as we pulled in we could see the birds at the ranch peering at us through the fence. There were about a thousand pigeons in the pickup. As soon as Matt opened their cages, the pigeons poured out like water, and then whooshed into the sky and disappeared into the morning. I couldn’t believe they would find their way home, or want to. At the very least, I figured, we would have several hours of waiting time in Gloucester before we would catch a glimpse of any of them. But when we got back to Matt’s house and walked into his yard, I could see all of his birds lined up on the roof of their coop, burbling and cooing, shuffling and bowing, as if they were performing the finale of a magic trick.
You can buy a racing pigeon for a hundred dollars, or you can spend thirty thousand dollars or more for birds from champion racing stock. In general, the costs are reasonable: pigeon feed is about twenty-five cents a pound; basic gear costs a few hundred dollars; club membership and racing fees are about two hundred and fifty dollars a year. The biggest expenses are an electronic timer, which can run close to a thousand dollars, and veterinary bills, if your birds get sick. Sedona got her first pigeons a couple of years ago, as a gift from a friend of Maggie’s, Bill Hussey, who calls his hundred-bird racing team Hussey-N-Da Lofts. Sedona was crazy about animals—at the time, the family already had an Australian shepherd, a cat, and a gecko—and she was especially fascinated by birds. When she was small, she liked to lie on the grass in the park near home and study wild pigeons for hours. To train Sedona’s birds for racing, Maggie had to wake at 5 A.M., wait for someone to come and watch the kids, drive the birds as much as an hour away, release them, then drive to police headquarters, where she is a detective, and start her workday. Maggie is divorced from the children’s father. “I think my father had a parrot once, but he had to give it away,” Sedona said. “I think he was allergic to it, and it didn’t like women.” Several years ago, the Murphys’ neighbors, Jim and Mary Reynolds, began walking the Murphys’ dog during the day. The Reynoldses are both deaf and they have no children; walking the Murphys’ dog led them to more involvement with Sedona and Patrick, and over time the Reynoldses have become like grandparents to them, babysitting while Maggie is at work, helping with projects around the house. The attachment is powerful. When Maggie told them that they were moving to Southborough, the Reynoldses decided that even though they’d been in the neighborhood for decades it might be time for them to move, too.
Hussey gave Sedona two baby birds, Soleil and Stella Luna, and when she joined South Shore Pigeon Flyers some club members gave her several more. The birds mated; she then had a flock of eighteen. At first, the pigeons lived in the house, in an old rabbit cage, which caused the dog, the cat, and the gecko to be somewhat discomfited. After it became impossible to walk through the kitchen without crunching on pigeon feed, Maggie bought a garden shed to use as a coop. Jim erected it at the far end of the long, narrow back yard. He had grown up nearby, and, as a kid, had friends with homing pigeons, so he knew how to care for them and helped Sedona run the coop. Patrick liked the birds and spent some time with them, but he is more of a dog-and-cat guy; it was Sedona who fell in love. She thought the pigeons were beautiful—“I know people think they’re plain or even homely,” she said, “but I think they’re little works of art”—and she loved seeing them in competition. She raced her young birds in the one- and two-hundred-mile races. She lost a few to hawks and to misdirection, and a few more to a virus that spread through the birds in the club, and she knew she was up against grownups with flocks of two hundred pedigreed racing champions, but she was still proud of her birds. One day when I was visiting her, she showed the birds to me, lifting and turning them every which way so that I could see their features, commenting on each one’s potential with the meticulousness of an auctioneer touting yearling colts at Keeneland. “This one’s texture is really excellent. . . . This one’s coloration is called a white grizzle, a beautiful bird. . . . This one has a proud chest. . . . This one, Patches, is too fat. We have to get her on a diet. . . . Lightning has very good genetics.”
By this time, Maggie had already made the decision to move: a hopscotch of packing boxes stretched from the front to the back door, and real-estate pamphlets lay in a heap on the kitchen table. It hadn’t been an easy decision: the house had been in Maggie’s family since the early nineteen-hundreds. But the neighborhood had changed, Maggie explained to me. Everyone she knew was moving away, and the new neighbors were the type to scold her kids for goofing around too close to their yards or playing tag in the street. She had found a handsome old house in Southborough, on almost an acre of land. It would give them all sorts of space, compared with South Boston, where the houses crowd in on one another.
Sedona plays baseball and soccer, and is an accomplished ballerina, but giving up the birds was a blow. Figuring them out was more compelling to her than figuring out how to hit a line drive or perform a jeté. Even when she knew that she would never again see her pigeons floating over the top of the house and zooming back to the coop, she doted on them, dreamily speculating about which birds might have made a mark in the races. Her successes had been modest—her best finish was her bird S.J., who came in forty-ninth in a race of three hundred birds. But, still, the possibilities seemed limitless. One hot afternoon near the end of summer, we sat out near the coop talking about the move. She allowed as how the new house was big and nice, and then she changed the subject and said she wanted to give the birds a bath and show me how affectionate they were with her, almost like dogs. The coop was tiny—we just fit in, crowding through the door—but it was clean and pleasant, filled with the odd, almost noiseless sound of the birds, a sort of cadenced vibration, like an unplugged electric guitar being strummed. Sedona picked up a dappled tan pigeon and hugged it close. “You know,” she said, “you can actually become a millionaire from your birds.”
There persists in Sedona’s mind the possibility that she will get her birds back someday—that she and her mother will build a huge aviary at the new house, and even though the birds would be prisoners they would live there happily. Recently, she has also said she might consider raising show pigeons, rather than pressing her mother to reclaim the birds she gave away. She thinks show pigeons are gorgeous; she had seen one riding on the back of a dog at a circus and was very impressed. Moreover, they are fat and placid, flying in somersaults if they fly at all, rather than always yearning to race home.
As a pigeon flyer, Sedona is atypical. Fans of the sport are mostly male and largely middle-aged or older. The pigeon clubs are clubby. The motto of the Greater Boston Homing Pigeon Concourse—the governing body of the pigeon clubs in the Boston area—is “Camaraderie Through Competition.” On the nights before races, members gather at their clubhouses to wait for the truck to collect their birds, but also to play cribbage, watch sports on TV, have a few drinks, tell dirty jokes. Maggie preferred to take Sedona and her birds to the South Shore Pigeon Flyers headquarters early; they would chat for a short time and head right home. Pigeon devotees have included Mike Tyson, Walt Disney, Picasso (who named one of his daughters Paloma, which is Spanish for dove), Marlon Brando (as Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront”), Roy Rogers, and King George V. Pigeon racing is not demographically diverse but it is multinational. In Belgium, its popularity is said to be on a par with cycling and soccer; it is thriving in England (where not long ago one exceptional racing pigeon sold for nearly two hundred thousand dollars) and in the rest of Europe (where videotapes about pigeon-racing stars like Marcel Sangers, “the Wonderboy of Holland,” are marketed with taglines like “Racing in the hotbed of Zutphen against some of the sport’s giants, Marcel has achieved what many can only dream about”). The sport is fashionable in the Middle East, and the Taiwanese have gone mad for it. Prize money in Taiwan’s biggest races can reach three million dollars, and gambling on them is commonplace; so is pigeon-related crime, including stringing gigantic nets across the route of a race and holding the trapped birds for ransom, and sneaking birds onto airplanes to hurry them to the finish line. Sharing affection for pigeons seems to fill people with an all-embracing global emotion. “Whatever language and whatever country you’re in,” the president of the American Racing Pigeon Union, Frank Greenhall, said recently, “you sit down with a pigeon man and you speak one language—pigeon.”
The American Racing Pigeon Union has ten thousand members and oversees eight hundred clubs around the country; another several hundred clubs are affiliated with the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers. Still, the numbers aren’t what they once were—for instance, there are about half as many members in Boston-area clubs as there were twenty years ago. Where have all the pigeon flyers gone? Some complain of weariness with the never-ending care that the sport requires, compared with a pastime like golf, and it has also become more difficult lately to keep a pigeon coop—concerns about disease and about whether the sport violates animal rights have prompted some cities to start regulating coops, and Chicago has made it unlawful to keep pigeons at all. The resurgence of hawks has made some people quit in frustration after their well-trained racing teams get eaten. But, recently, newcomers from China and Vietnam have begun joining the sport in the United States, and people who love pigeons see other signs to be hopeful. Last summer, I went to Fall River, Massachusetts, to attend the annual auction and picnic at the racing club there. Greenhall was addressing the crowd. “People keep saying the sport is dying, but the sport is bigger than ever before,” he said, over the din of kids shouting at each other in the SpongeBob SquarePants bounce house, a group of men discussing the virtues of the birds being auctioned, and people jostling in line for barbecue. “For instance,” Greenhall continued, “we are close to having the Boy Scouts recognize pigeon racing as a merit badge. . . . We have nine school systems using pigeons to teach math and science.” He looked around the picnic, nodding with satisfaction, and added, “We even have prisons starting pigeon racing!”
There are just a handful of female pigeon flyers, but what really set Sedona apart was her age. She was well known in the Boston pigeon-racing world because there are so few kids in the sport. I once asked her if that distinction was actually kind of cool. “The other people in the club were not exactly fun,” she said, slowly. “But they were, um, interesting.” The pigeon people I met found their failure to interest their own children in it exasperating. They said their children thought pigeons were too much work; they complained that their kids were only into computers, that their sons were only interested in girls. Some people I met had first taken up pigeon racing as children and then abandoned it, and had returned to it later in life. I thought this would have assured them that their kids would eventually find their way to the sport. But many of them had an uneasiness, a foreboding that, regardless of the good news about the Boy Scouts and math classes and prisons, and the fact that more people are joining the sport as families these days, it is on the wane. That worry seemed to be also an expression of their ambivalence about a pastime that is unusually confining. The morning of the Greenfield training toss, I waited for Matt in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, along with five other pigeon racers. It was five-forty-five in the morning. I asked one of the racers how he was, and he said, “Honestly, I’m tired. I mean . . . I’m driving out here and I’m asking myself, I’m getting up at 5 A.M. for some bird?”
Matt is the race secretary of the Greater Boston Homing Pigeon Concourse, and yet he confided to me that he thinks he is starting to talk himself out of being a pigeon racer. Still, even though he has set his birds free and watched them return hundreds and hundreds of times, he seems exhilarated each time they lift into the air and then miraculously reappear at home. That morning in the parking lot, he was eager to take the birds out to Greenfield and let them fly. “Hey, let’s get these birds and get going!” he hollered. “We’re four minutes late already!”
The day we went to Greenfield, some of Matt’s other birds were flying in a race. The release was in Ilion, New York, about two hundred miles from Boston—224.592 miles from Matt’s coop, to be exact, for purposes of calculating their time and speed. Matt was rushing back to Gloucester so he could see his flock come home. He was feeling optimistic, even though he was not having the best season of his career. “Since I’ve been sick, I haven’t done so well, so everyone likes me,” he said, slapping the steering wheel. “When my birds were doing really well, there was lots of envy. With pigeon guys, there are always lots of feuds.” His cell phone rang. “Birds went up at seven-forty-five,” he said. “O.K., good luck.” Within a minute, the phone rang again; he gave the same message. During the rest of the drive back to Gloucester, his phone rang every few moments. Matt was in a philosophical mood. Before he became ill, he did construction and remodelling work; now he devotes his time to tending his birds and puttering around the house and speculating about the future. His wife, Joan, often drives to the training tosses, because he tires easily. She probably has more pigeon business in her life than she counted on. Matt underwent chemotherapy, and for a year he was too sick to clean the coop and feed the birds, so Joan did it all herself and developed a lung condition that can be caused by exposure to bird dander. Their vacations are limited to times when they can find someone to bird-sit. “And whenever we do go on vacation, I spend some time doing pigeons,” Matt said. “I leave Joan at the pool and go find some pigeon guys. I have to.”
The day was hot and still. When we got back to Gloucester, we sat in the yard, listening to the cicadas click and the leaves on a huge maple tree beside his house rustle and sigh. I mentioned what a beautiful tree it was. “Well, it is,” Matt said. “It’s just that it blocks my view of the birds when they’re heading in.” He had a cordless phone next to him, which rang every few minutes. “Hello, Louie. . . . No, I don’t have any birds yet. . . . O.K., good luck.” He checked his watch, checked the sky, checked his watch again. The phone rang again. “No, John, I don’t have any yet.” Another ring. He turned the ringer off, saying he didn’t want to know whose birds were back. His own team was late. “I’m disgusted,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
I asked Matt if he knew Sedona; he remembered meeting her briefly, at a pigeon auction. I wondered if he had considered taking some of her birds. He laughed. “No way,” he said, shaking his head. He mentioned that he and Joan would be vacationing in Tampa soon; their son had agreed to take care of the pigeons. Increasingly, Tampa is where pigeon guys go to retire; Frank Greenhall told me that a subdivision near Tampa has been nicknamed Little Belgium, because of all the pigeon fanciers who have moved in. Maybe while they were down there, Matt said, he and Joan would look at real estate. On a day like this, with his team underperforming, the idea of moving seemed more palatable, maybe even appealing. “I love my birds,” he said, “but I always wonder why I’m doing this.” He suddenly bolted to his feet, pointing past the maple. “I got a bird!” he yelled. I could see a dark shape gliding around the crown of the tree, spiralling downward; then a bird landed on top of the coop. It was glossy and gray, with pink feet and bright, round eyes. It had just flown two hundred miles on instinct or memory, or perhaps it was drawn back these two hundred miles because it loved where it lived. It was unruffled, composed, as if it had spent the whole morning scratching for feed at home. “C’mon, c’mon,” Matt called out, until the bird crossed the finish line, registering its return at 13:15:42. He took a huge breath and then grabbed his phone, hit the speed dial, and shouted, “Hey! Louie! I got a bird!” ♦