Determing The Gender of Pigeons

Recently I had a fancier who is relatively new to pigeons ask me about sexing birds. I have a few thoughts on this--don't I always? :-) --and I would be curious to hear what others have to say about this.

Immature Pigeons Attempting to sex immature pigeons is usually a waste of time. Unless you have specific genetics involved (see below) as far as I know it's practically impossible to sex pigeons before they reach sexual maturity.

Slower Maturing Breeds Some breeds of pigeons mature more slowly than others. I saw Dr. James Gratz's article in a recent issue of Purebred Pigeon magazine about sexing frillbacks and he mentioned that they can be slow to mature. I have Old Dutch Capuchines and they seem to be a little slow to mature too.

Checking the Width of the Pubic Bones You can feel the pubic bones on the bird <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_skeleton#Skeletal_system>. The gap between the pubic bones should be wider on a hen (to let the egg pass out). However, the gap on a male runt will be far wider than the gap on a fantail hen so you need to have a known female or male of the
breed you're checking to get an idea of approximately how wide the pubic bones should be. And the wise fancier remembers that there is almost always some variation in nature.

In relation to this a very knowledgeable fancier of my acquaintance had this to say about this technique:

I've asked a lot of learned people and experienced fanciers about this vent stuff and there doesn't seem to be any sexually dymorphic constant in vent bone width. I haven't found any information based on statistical analysis to prove this apparent "wags tail" as any more reliable then a washer and a string. In Willard Hollanders' Origins and Excursions in Pigeon Genetics he states that beak length in wild pigeons can be sexually dymorphic but this relationship does not hold up in domestic fancy breeds.

The "washer and string" he's referring to is documented below.

Genetics to Help with Gender Determination Certain matings will result in certain colorations in the offspring. Rather than risk increasing the sum total of incorrect information floating around the internet, I'll refer those interested in learning more about these
matings to this page: <http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/pigeongenetics/SEX-LINKAGE.html> by
Frank Mosca that gives an excellent explanation of how sex-linkage in genetics can help a fancier to determine the gender of the result of certain matings. Texan Autosexing Pioneers were developed to allow commercial squab houses to easily sort out their young pigeons by gender and they take advantage of another sex-linked mating.

Observation of Behavior I feel the best way to determine gender is to simply put the bird which is unknown into a confinement pen next to a bird that is a known gender. Then watch how they react to each other. If you put an unknown next to a male, the male may ignore the
unknown or he may start crowing and puffing up his chest and dragging his tail. If he ignores the unknown then you haven't gotten an answer yet. But if he starts crowing and puffing up his chest then the unknown is likely a hen.

You can, of course, do the opposite with a hen; putting a hen next to an unknown pigeon may cause the unknown to crow and drag his tail and court the hen.

DNA Testing Dr. Gratz mentioned in his article that he uses an avian DNA testing service. This is always a possibility too.

Vent Sexing The following text comes from a fellow pigeon fancier. I'm a little hesitant to put it here because I'm afraid some people who don't know how to do this technique correctly will try this and injure pigeons. I would consult an avian vet if you're unsure how this technique works. How one goes about stimulating a male pigeon (other than putting him next to a hen) is a question for which I do not know the answer. And if you stimulate the male pigeon by putting him next to a hen, you don't need to open his vent to see which he is.

Pigeons can be vent sexed like chickens when they have reached sexual maturity. You use a Baby Nasal Speculum to gain access through the vent. If you stimulate the vent area and then open it up with the speculum you will be able to see the male sexual organs after stimulation. It is the same proceedureused in stimulating the male bird when using artificial insemination.

Washer and String Certain pigeon fanciers believe that it's possible to tie a washer to a string and hold the washer above the pigeon which has an unknown gender. I don't know that it has to be a washer; I believe any bit of electically conductive metal is supposed to work. I can't remember exactly how this is supposed to work--I think the string is supposed to swing back and forth in the same plane if the bird is one sex or around in a circle if the bird is the opposite sex.

Personally I think this is an example of what psychologists call "ideomotor action":

<http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_168.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_action>

It's important to note that people don't have to be intending to deceive anyone for this ideomotor action to occur. People can be (and are) honestly unaware of the fact that they're causing the motion.

In brief, I think the fancier probably has a guess which one the bird is and, without realizing it, they make very subtle movements that either cause the washer to circle or swing back and forth. It would be easy to test: Have someone who's blindfolded hold the string and washer above a bird. Or attach the string and washer to a fixed stick. But as they say in the first article I linked above, people want to believe there is some magic in the world and pigeon fanciers
are no different.

At any rate, I know there are some intelligent, experienced fanciers for whom I have a lot of respect who swear this washer and string method works; I suppose if nothing else they'll be right half of the time. But a person would be right half of the time by flipping a coin too.

Technorati Tags: domesticated pigeons, how-to, novices

How To Make The NPA Important Again (Part 2)

In the long exchange of ideas that I had with another pigeon fancier regarding the NPA and how it seems to have become somewhat irrelevant to many fanciers, one of the things that I pointed out is the NPA Quarterly Bulletin. This seems like a part of the NPA that has seen better days.

Now I know that some are going to disagree with me on this but please keep an open mind. How about this: instead of publishing a quarterly bulletin, how about the NPA contracts with Purebred Pigeon (PP) magazine to do an annual NPA focused issue. Once a year, say the March/April issue, the NPA gets a whole issue devoted to updates on the club, shows, and other NPA business. Specialty clubs regularly get an entire issue devoted to them; why can't the NPA do this on a regular basis?

I can hear a few of the objections already:

1. Not every NPA member has a subscription to Purebred Pigeon nor should they be forced to get one. Fair enough. For this annual issue, the NPA has extra copies printed to be mailed to those members that don't get PP. Of course, we might want to encourage members to subscribe to PP but that wouldn't be necessary for this scheme to work.
   
2. People that are not members of the NPA will see the NPA update. So what? If they see what the NPA is doing, maybe they'll be persuaded to join. Advertising a volunteer organization is not a bad thing. The current bulletin doesn't seem to be a major selling point for the NPA anyway. Maybe an annual NPA issue might help to persuade people that they should join the NPA.
   
3. What happens if Purebred Pigeon goes out of business? I sincerely hope they don't but if they do, then the NPA can always revert back to what it's doing now.
   
4. We need more than one update per year for the NPA. I'm not so sure about that. Show results are often shared via the various specialty clubs and the NPA could "lease" the March/April issue so that there would be plenty of time to tabulate the results from the Grand National.
   
5. We'll have to share the revenues from the NPA Bulletin with Purebred Pigeon magazine. I'm not sure--does the NPA sell ads in the quarterly bulletin? Is it a really large revenue stream for the club? I mean this might be a real obstacle if the club were to decide to go this route. In fact this may be the only real obstacle that I can see to pursuing this idea.

This arrangement would give the NPA a much nicer, more professional looking "bulletin", it would save the NPA on postage costs to those members that are also subscribers to PP and it would help to keep the only magazine we have in the US devoted to show pigeons alive and well.

How To Make The NPA Important Again (Part 1)

On the Michigan Pigeon Email List, we recently (well, maybe a month or so ago) had a long, drawn-out discussion of the relevance of the NPA to today's pigeon fancier. Another fancier made some excellent points and one of the better points he made was that if a fancier feels that the NPA has become somewhat irrelevant (as I do) then that fancier should come up with ways to improve the NPA and suggest those improvements. It's a good point; far easier to point out flaws than to figure out ways to fix them. So, in that spirit, I've been considering how the NPA might be changed to make it a relevant and important organization again. I'll be posting a series of articles each addressing some strategy or tactic to make the NPA relevant again.

One of the things that Willi Riechert, one of the candidates in the 2007 election for the NPA presidency, said he would do is to reach out to youth organizations to get more youth involved with pigeons. I'm paraphrasing a bit on what he said but that seemed to be the gist of his idea. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a matter of great importance to me--getting young people involved in our hobby.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been to two county fairs here in Michigan and I've heard about a third one. The Oakland County fair is moving in a good direction as regards a pigeon exhibit. They've gotten steadily more pigeons entered over the past three years and for the past two years, they've had separate pigeon judges that actually are pigeon judges (as opposed to poultry judges simply doing double duty). The Monroe County fair is in the same place that the Oakland County fair was a few years ago; that is, a few pigeons entered and no special cooping for the pigeons and no special pigeon judge. I heard from another pigeon fancier who is also a 4-H resource leader that the Ingham County fair is also pretty much in the same shape as the Monroe County fair; that is a few pigeons judged by a poultry judge.

This seems to me to be an opportunity just waiting for the NPA. We could put together a list of pigeon fanciers willing to volunteer as judges for these various county fairs. Granted not every fair will get a pigeon judge of vast experience but even a pigeon fancier with a few years of experience knows better what he or she is looking at than does a poultry judge. The point is to give the kids that are showing the birds some helpful advice about how to improve their stock. Also, just knowing that there are other pigeon fanciers around will help to improve the morale of these kids. Talking to some of them they seem to feel that keeping pigeons is some very oddball, niche hobby that very few people pursue. If they were to see that there are other people who also like pigeons, it would be a great boost and encouragement to them.

Once we have a list of pigeon fanciers willing to act as volunteer judges, the next step would be to organize judging workshops. This would get those volunteers that are willing but possibly not knowledgeable enough the training that they need. Experienced judges could work with these new volunteers to disseminate the needed knowledge.

Of course, the NPA would also have to contact the various county fair boards to make them aware that this volunteer help is available. Some county fairs might decline the help but usually when you offer volunteer help, most organizations are glad to have it.

Finally, the NPA could sponsor a best pigeon trophy for each of these county fairs. It wouldn't cost that much and it would encourage kids that might not otherwise consider pigeons to think about raising them. Again, it'd be up to the various county fair boards but again I doubt many of them will turn down the offer of a prize that's likely to encourage more entries--especially when it's offered for free.

Of course, the NPA could put a stipulation on the trophy that no unbanded pigeon could win (to keep people from simply rounding up commons and entering them in the show) and that the prize is only awarded with a minimum number of pigeons and fanciers. But the principle is still the same.

I'd suggest that this be coordinated in each state served by the NPA on a state-by-state basis. Each state representative could coordinate the judging lists and the judging workshops as well as getting the trophies for the various county fair boards and getting the needed rule changes started with each county fair.

Taken to every county fair in the country, this could start a real resurgence of young people interested in keeping pigeons. Even if it goes nowhere (which is not unlikely) it's a step. And this is certainly something that is more in the bailiwick of the NPA than any other pigeon club; showing pigeons is what we do.

Novice Corner - Can They Find Home?

One of the more common questions posed to me by novice fanciers (or people considering getting pigeons) is usually some variation of "Can these birds find their way home?" This is the pigeon's great claim to fame; the ability to return home from some place they've never seen before even if that place is hundreds of miles away.

1. Racing homers are bred to come home from a long ways away (sometimes as much as 500 miles). However, even given that, the birds need to practice finding their way home from shorter distances. Part of this magical ability to find their way home is learning where home is. The pigeons have be able to get out of the loft to see landmarks, smell the landscape and generally learn how to recognize home from the air.
2. Fancy pigeons, that is, jacobins, fantails, trumpeters etc., were selected for their appearance and not their ability to return home from long distances. They might be able to return home but I wouldn't bank on it. Having said that though, a fancier should be able to let fancy pigeons out of the loft (provided they've been trained in how to trap back into the loft) with no worry of the bird getting lost. That's not to say that letting your pigeons out won't offend your neighbors or possibly expose them to becoming a raptor's dinner. That's just to say that you should be able to let even fancy pigeons out and they should be relatively ok, all other things being equal.
3. It's not uncommon for animals to have behaviors that are partially driven by instinct and partially learned. I recall reading an article from Scientific American regarding how baby gulls were born with an instinct for getting food from their parents but that they also improved upon that basic instinct by learning how to better get the food from their parents over time. I don't believe it would be a dangerously large leap of logic to infer that the behavior of being able to return home from long distances in pigeons is at least partially learned.

So, bottom line, yes, you can fly pretty much any pigeon but I wouldn't take anything other than a racing homer any appreciable distance from a loft and even then I'd make sure that the racing homer had a good chance to learn the lay of the land.

4-H Exploration Days

4-H Exploration Days Group
Originally uploaded by MinimalistFan.

One of my great pleasures as a pigeon fancier is to get to share my birds with others. And the icing on the cake, so to speak, is to share them with young people. I had the privilege again this year of teaching a session at the Michigan 4-H Exploration Days in East Lansing. And I was lucky enough to get a great group of kids to work with and an excellent assistant, Janine. It's truly an extra special pleasure to be able to talk to smart kids that ask me good questions that keep me on my toes as a pigeon fancier trying to tell others about my hobby. Kudos to all the kids for making the session as much fun for me as I hope it was for all of them. I had a BLAST!

By the way, Janine took the pictures--all of which you can see here.