An instinct for home
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Jerry Gagne places an identification band on a one-week-old pigeon.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Jerry Gagne’s homing pigeons fly around his home. Gagne keeps pigeons and trains them to be released at weddings and funerals.
Jerry Gagne’s love of pigeons developed while he was running for his life.
At 10 years old, a scrawny Jerry was a favorite target of the neighborhood bullies who liked to chase him home from school.
As he was cutting through someone’s yard, Jerry noticed a building housing dozens and dozens of pigeons. It stopped him in his tracks. That was 67 years ago.
Today, pigeons are the Beaver County resident’s livelihood. He owns and runs, with his family, Foy’s Pet Supplies, the oldest and largest pigeon supply business in the country.
“I’ve talked to many other old-timers and nobody understands why they (keep pigeons.) I compare it to people keeping parakeets or canaries or snakes. For some reason, you just lock into something. When I was 10, I had pigeons. My brother, who is four years older, still has pigeons,” he said of the hobby. “A lot of old-timers will call me and say, ‘I had pigeons when I was young. I remember I had a lot of fun. I want to get back into it.'”
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Homing doves – actually pigeons – take flight from their loft at Jerry Gagne’s home in Beaver Falls. Pigeons and doves make up the bird family Columbidae, which includes about 310 species.
Jerry grew up in Maine, a son of a fisherman from Quebec who didn’t speak English – Jerry said his French-speaking father neither approved nor disapproved of his keeping pigeons. His mother, from Grand Manan, a small island between Maine and Nova Scotia, supported her son’s passion for keeping the birds. By the time he was 16, Jerry had more than 1,000 pigeons. He worked just to keep and feed them.
Jerry was in his early 20s when he and his brother were approached by Charles Foy, then the owner of Foy’s.
“My brother and I had a small business, and they had bought something from us. They must have liked our work,” said Jerry.
Foy offered to sell the business to the brothers. But Jerry was entering the military, and they couldn’t afford it.
More than 50 years later, Jerry got another opportunity to purchase Foy’s. This time, he took it.
“It was meant to be,” he said. “When I told my wife I was going to buy a pigeon business, she said, ‘You’re going to buy what and pay how much?’ We did and thank God she backed me. Now, we’re all experts.”
In addition to selling supplies and an occasional bird, Jerry gives advice to others who raise homing pigeons.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Peter Hennigan of Canonsburg holds one of his pigeons in the loft at his home.
Homing pigeons, born with the instinct to return to their home, can be trained to compete in races. Jerry said there are clubs all over the the world, and races that range in size from small club races, to those in Las Vegas and South Africa that pay $1 million to the winner.
Pigeons are kept in a loft. Jerry starts training them when they are very young. First, he takes them outside in a cage, so they can look around, but not escape. After a few days, he opens the cage, so they can go in and out. After a few days of that, he removes the cage. The birds will fly to the roof or surrounding trees, but because they are hungry or thirsty, they’ll return to their loft to eat or drink.
“They learn very quickly,” he said. “When they start to fly in a circle in a group, I know it’s time.”
Jerry will take the birds a short distance, at first. He’ll go a half-mile from home and release them. The next time, it’s a mile, then five miles, and so on. He trains pigeons that are hired to be released at weddings and funerals at 50 miles. The birds won’t fly away until all the flock is together.
For races, the birds can be driven hundreds of miles away. When Jerry was a kid, pigeons would be sent on trains for 1,500-mile races. They were identified by a number that was attached to a leg with a rubber band. Now the cost is too great to ship the birds by train, so many clubs host smaller races.
Participants take their pigeons to the club the day before a race. There, their identification tag is scanned. The device not only identifies the birds, but is able to record how fast the bird flies in yards per minute, so it doesn’t matter where a pigeon’s home is located.
A hired driver takes all the racers to an agreed-upon location, and, if the weather cooperates, releases them. Once the birds reach their home, they walk over a computerized landing pad that records their return and provides the necessary information, including their speed. With the wind behind them, the pigeons can fly as face as 65 mph.
Jerry said that in a 200-to-300-mile race, a pigeon can win by just a few seconds.
Most birds make it home, although some can become the prey of hawks.
Jerry was once visited by a group of college students, who wanted to study the habits of the pigeons. They placed cameras on the birds, and discovered they didn’t always fly home in a straight line. At times, they would go off course or around an obstacle.
“But they came back in a timely manner,” Jerry said. “Their instinct is so strong, they make it home.”
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Jerry Gagne holds pigeons that are just a few days old at his Beaver Falls home. Homing pigeons are born with the instinct to find their way home, but the birds have to be trained to return from long distances.