At the Lyndhurst Homing Pigeon Club, it is said that all members are friends until race day. That’s when bragging rights and the potential for thousands of dollars in prize money unleash a fierce competitive streak.
And on a recent Saturday night, the first race of a new season was hours away.
Joe Esteves, the club’s president, toted a crate holding 25 pigeons into the clubhouse on the outskirts of the working-class township of Lyndhurst, N.J., 11 miles west of Manhattan.
Each of the birds had been raised from birth for the obscure yet centuries-old pastime of pigeon racing. And while the first race of the pigeons’ lives would be a 100-mile sprint, the margin of victory could be a matter of seconds.
Mr. Esteves, a 42-year-old father of four, was late. The room had already filled with the easy chatter of longtime club members and an undercurrent of unspoken, competitive grudges.
Similar scenes were playing out that night in the more than two dozen homing pigeon clubs that still operate in New Jersey.
Mike Tyson, who traces his career as a champion heavyweight boxer to a childhood incident involving a pigeon killed by a bully in Brooklyn, keeps pigeons behind a bar in Jersey City, N.J., making him the state’s most prominent fan of the bird. Most other racers are far less famous but no less passionate.
“Tonight me, you, somebody else, goes to the club,” explained Mario Costa, 70, who owns the bar, the Ringside. “You bring your best birds. Whoever comes home first wins.”
It is rarely that simple. In recent years, dwindling open spaces and fast-fading traditions have winnowed the field of participants, threatening a pursuit that can trace its roots to ancient Egypt.
Animal rights activists, who consider the races abusive and unethical, say good riddance.
The liberator
In the Northeast, the racing season for pigeons born this year — a.k.a. young birds — begins in August and runs through late October. Birds more than 1 year old race in the spring and fly farther, sometimes 500 miles or more.
The sport is more prominent in warm-weather states like Florida and Texas. But the Central Jersey Combine, which coordinates the local competitions, has clung to its standing as one of the country’s largest pigeon-racing organizations, said Gene Yoes, a retired lawyer who trains pigeons in Montana and publishes Racing Pigeon Digest, a national magazine.
The start of the competition — the so-called liberation — can be as tense as it is spectacular.
The birds soar and hook, undulating across the sky before orienting east toward home. On a good day, they will fly about 60 miles per hour, although champions with the benefit of a strong tailwind have reached speeds of nearly 100 m.p.h.
This year, Daniel Quinn is Central Jersey’s designated liberator, a title he said can draw quizzical looks.
“It sort of has its moments,” Mr. Quinn said of the $425 overnight gig, which he took on last year and which supplements his income hanging drywall. “I started out just emptying the old crates out of the trailer. The liberator that was there quit, so they asked me if I could go.”
On race-day Sundays, Mr. Quinn, 61, sleeps overnight in the cab of a truck that can hold crates for more than 4,000 birds. Soon after dawn, he and the driver use levers to release the contestants more or less at once during the roughly 20 races held each year.
The first race of the 10-week young bird season began at the Flying J truck stop in Frystown, Pa. From there, the pigeons traveled different routes and distances to reach their home coops.
An average flight speed is calculated with the individual distance traveled by a bird and the time it took. Birds with the fastest pace are crowned the winner.
“When they come home, it’s just a beautiful thing,” said Vinnie Torre, whose coop in Wayne, N.J., Hillside Loft, is named for his father’s old barbershop in Hoboken. “It’s therapy, actually.”
G.I. Joe’s legacy
Organized pigeon competitions began in Belgium in the early 1800s, and the first races in the United States were held decades later, in New Jersey and New York, where by 1883, pigeon racing news would appear as prominently as Page 3 in The New York Times.
During World War I, the U.S. Army began training pigeons at Fort Monmouth, on the Jersey Shore, to deliver battlefield messages. In the Second World War, a pigeon trained at the base, G.I. Joe, saved the lives of 1,000 Allied troops by carrying an order to cancel a scheduled bombing.
The birds use a well-researched yet still mysterious set of skills to find their way home. In unfamiliar territory, scientists have found that the birds are guided by smell, the earth’s magnetic field and the angle of the sun; over familiar turf, they rely on the landscape.
The sport remains most vibrant in Europe, where in 2020 a 2-year-old hen, New Kim, sold for $1.9 million and premier races in Barcelona draw more than 17,000 birds. In the United States, so-called one-loft races — where birds compete only against pigeons housed in the same professionally managed coop — advertise winning pots as high as $1.2 million.
At the Lyndhurst club, prizes are drawn from entry fees, and a premier long-distance race can net a first-place winner about $6,500, said Mr. Torre, who sold his salvage shop and used-car lot and retired years ago, giving him the flexibility to train his 80 birds most mornings at sunup.
He drives the birds a little farther away each week, building strength and navigational prowess during training runs known as tosses.
Immigrants from countries including Portugal, Poland and the Philippines have infused the sport with new energy. But modernity has taken a toll.
At 56, Wesley Wilczewski is the youngest member of the Queen City Pigeon Club in Piscataway, N.J.
“It’s shrinking like crazy, year by year,” said Mr. Wilczewski, a plumber who learned the sport from his father in Poland. “Nobody wants to spend any time in the coop cleaning. They want to play on the phones.”
Hoboken, a mile-square commuter city across the Hudson River from Manhattan, was once home to hundreds of rooftop coops, a tradition memorialized in the classic 1954 movie “On the Waterfront,” starring Marlon Brando. But many communities in New Jersey, including Hoboken, have outlawed coops, bowing to concerns about rodents, the demand for luxury apartment buildings with rooftop decks and pressure from animal rights organizations.
The birds are exposed during races and training tosses to the elements and to predators like hawks. Not all of them come home. Groups that include People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have condemned the pastime as cruel, saying it exploits animals for prize money and encourages illegal gambling.
“They don’t want to think of themselves as monsters,” Hannah Schein, vice president of investigations and research at PETA, said of pigeon racers, some of whom cull slow birds and separate mates to incentivize them to fly home quickly. “But to us it’s monstrous.”
“You’re using emotional manipulation to get them to come home faster,” she added, “so you can have a winning moment with your friends.”
New Jersey pigeon racers say they take pride in treating their animals well.
“They come home,” said Steven Costa, 34, a member of a racing club in Perth Amboy, N.J. “That means I’m making them happy.”
‘Tyson’s Corner’
Mr. Tyson’s birds live behind the Ringside, across a busy truck route from Mr. Costa’s diner, the White Mana, which was built for the 1939 New York World’s Fair but found fame in Jersey.
After the death of Camille Ward, Mr. Tyson’s surrogate mother, Mr. Costa brought the pigeons living at the boxer’s childhood home in Catskill, N.Y., to Jersey City. Generations of their offspring have thrived on rooftops near the Ringside.
Birds that fly for “Tyson’s Corner” compete at the Lyndhurst club.
Mr. Esteves, the club’s president, said a love of animals first drew him to the hobby as a child after he found an injured pigeon and nursed it back to health.
“It kind of just takes you away,” he said, “from the rest of the world.”
He now works in medical equipment sales and with his wife buys and sells real estate and owns frozen dessert franchises, leaving little time for pigeon training.
Still, he fared well this season. The day of the first race, the fastest of Mr. Esteves’s pigeons flew home in two hours, 32 minutes and 47 seconds. That was good enough for second place at the Lyndhurst club, though a far more distant 116th-place finish among the combine entrants.
Mr. Torre’s fastest bird clocked an average flight speed about four seconds slower, earning him third place in the day’s club rankings.
Mr. Esteves said his club payout was about $50, less than the $80 entry fee for 25 pigeons.
“If you are looking to make money to support your hobby,” he said, “this is not the hobby for you.”
The post Mike Tyson, Marlon Brando, G.I. Joe: The Old-World Art of Pigeon Racing appeared first on New York Times.
