You let it loose and it starts to fly and it comes back to its loft.” Then, when it’s three or four months old and used to being on its own for at least an hour, you take it on trips five kilometers away, to the north, south, east and west, so it begins to develop its sense of orientation. For training them, you start off by letting your pigeon fly around at home so it gets to know its own rooftop. It’s like comparing a thoroughbred horse with one that pulls a hay wagon. “Well, first you must understand that these pigeons are twice as big as ordinary ones. “How do you train a pigeon to become a deportista?” I asked. So my father bought a pair of pigeons from our neighbor and I started caring for them.” Well, they grabbed my attention because - unlike chickens - they could fly and they always came back. Padilla told me, “and lived next door to a neighbor who raised pigeons. “How did you get interested in these birds?” I asked him. I learned all this from Juan Jorge Padilla, a Guadalajara-based veterinarian who specializes in pigeons and doves. One bird’s average speed may differ from another’s by a fraction of a second. These calculations are important because the lofts at which these birds are arriving are scattered all around metropolitan Guadalajara, so the distance each flew from Zacatecas is slightly different. The computer then divides the exact distance flown by your bird by the amount of time it was flying and determines, on average, how many meters per minute the bird flew.
Next, the scanner must be carried to the club and its information transferred to the club’s computer. When it does, the chip is recognized by the electronic scanner and the exact time of arrival is registered. All these birds are driven to Zacatecas in specially modified trucks and are simultaneously released in some remote spot early in the morning.īack in Guadalajara, the pigeon owner anxiously waits for his or her bird to arrive. Typically, some 25,000 birds may be registered for this. Let’s say the competition is for yearlings who must fly from Zacatecas to Guadalajara, a distance of about 300 kilometers. Then, those of your birds that will compete are fitted with a band containing a radio-frequency identification chip which is registered in a very sophisticated electronic timing scanner which you must purchase. Whoever wants to compete must register with a club which sends a representative to your house to take the exact GPS coordinates of your pigeon loft. In Greater Guadalajara there are approximately 25 clubs and every year they hold two big events: one competition for birds over a year old and another for yearlings, young birds, which are called pichones in Spanish. Pigeon fanciers say it is both an art and a sport, because it involves raising and caring for the bird, protecting it from sickness and training it to be a deportista (sports competitor). In Spanish, raising and racing pigeons is called colombofilia, which comes from the Latin word columba, which means dove or pigeon in English and paloma in Spanish. The city of Guadalajara, for example, is home to some 1,100 pigeon fanciers, who put up to 45,000 birds into competition every year.
Nowadays this sport is most popular in Jalisco and Michoacán. I’m talking about pigeon racing, which has been practiced as organized competition in this country since 1936. While the media in Mexico are forever filled with chatter about futbol and béisbol, there is another sport dear to the heart of many Mexicans which rarely ever makes the news. Colombofilia, a forgotten sport dear to the heart of many Mexicans
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