A disaster flight. That has become the race from Narbonne in France, which 26,000 pigeons started at the end of last week. Due to a thunderstorm, the pigeons lost their way en masse. Also pigeon fanciers from Brabant have come out of the battle battered. Almost everyone is still waiting for half or a third of the number of released birds. So far, only six thousand pigeons have come home. “This has gone completely wrong, a child could have seen it coming.”
Frans Belleter from Nispen, one of the many victims, makes no bones about it. “All this was not necessary. Even a primary school kid could have imagined that the pigeons would get caught in a thunderstorm. But no, then there are adult people in Belgium, because they have organized this competition, who have no idea about it and who decide with their chest that the competition can go on after all. They turned it into a power struggle.”
“Thunderstorms have completely disoriented pigeons.”
“This would have been unthinkable in the Netherlands. Here, a warning for bad weather was not ignored,” the 68-year-old pedigree fancier is sure. He was on the list of participants with eight pigeons. Four of them returned to home base; of the four other pigeons it is guesswork whether they will ever come back. “Thunderstorms have such a big impact on these guys. This leads to a complete disorientation of the mechanism by which they come home.” Pigeon fanciers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg took part in the competition.
Belleter holds his breath as to what is happening to those left behind or maybe has already happened. “They’ve been on the road for so long. The pigeons get tired. They may now be in Germany or have settled somewhere to look for food, but then they are often prey for birds of prey. I certainly hope not.”
The pigeon fancier is especially concerned about the son of one of his four pigeons that did survive the race, a talent in the pigeon colony of the experienced fancier. His birds are everything to him: “I was four years old when I first ringed a pigeon.”
“This happens once every ten to fifteen years.”
Belleter calls the suffering that befell him and much of his colleague as painful as it is unique. “Almost everyone has the same losses. This happens once every ten to fifteen years. Fortunately, four of me returned. Moreover, one of them belonged to the thirteen best of the Dutch pigeons and he became the 27th of the entire international field.”
Frans does not want to sit down. Suffering (and processing) loss is also part of pigeon sport. He has basketed some brood this evening for a short flight. In the meantime, he hopes, against his better judgment or not, that some of his lost birds will find their way home after all.
Now don’t expect him to be on the lookout this evening or the night ahead. Does he not trust it at all? That’s not the point. The racing pigeon world is also moving with the times. Frans: “I have had an installation installed in my lofts where the alarm goes off when my pigeons fall on the flap. So I don’t have to stay home or stay up for that.”
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