GALION — John Blue has a high-flying hobby. His eyes are always on the sky.
Blue is a pigeon flyer.
The 71-year-old, who has owned racing pigeons since grade school, has 48 flyers in his backyard chicken coop. They’re his “girls and boys,” a specific breed of pigeons called Racing Homers which he takes to competitions as far away as Illinois.
“The young ones that I raised this year, I’ll be training them in the not too distant future,” he said, pointing to the gray and white creatures perched behind the wire fencing. “Right now, they’re just flying around the neighborhood.”
Racing pigeons, known for their athleticism and homing instincts, can fly for hours on end, sometimes traveling between 600 and 700 miles a day. They’re fast too, averaging speeds of 60 miles an hour. But they always find their way home.
That’s the beauty of the pigeon racing, what’s often called a “marathon in the sky.”
For every race, each animal is tracked and timed. They must go a calculated distance, with a rubber tag on their foot as identification. All the birds are trailered to a designated race station at night and released the next morning.
Then the wait begins.
Blue, who has always been an animal lover, raised pigeons as a youngster in Troy, Ohio. Most of his birds back then were Flying Rollers, but it wasn’t until after he married and moved to New Carlisle that he bought more birds and started flying them at clubs in Ohio and Indiana.
The couple’s two adopted daughters, who were six and 10 at the time, became fascinated with training pigeons, too.
“The girls would be in the back yard and I would whistle and call them in,” he recalled. “The girls would get in the feed barrel and the birds lined up and down their arms.”
Although new to the sport, the Blue sisters were winning big time, beating out older guys at the club.
“The secret was the girls had them as pets and they wanted to come home,” Blue said. “And we did very well. We probably won 25 to 30 trophies in races and shows.”
Pigeon racing as a family affair eventually ended in the late 1990’s as Blue’s daughters became older and move involved in school activities. After his wife died, Blue later relocated to Galion, remarried and started raising and racing again.
He designed and built custom cages onto the sides of a backyard shed for a pair of newly-purchased fliers.
“And then some of my buddies found out I was into pigeons again and gave some to me,” he said, “plus they’re very prolific, you know.”
One time a young bird only one month old never came back. Blue figured a hawk swooped down and killed it, but days later the bird was found 540 miles away in New York.
“That’s amazing to me, for a baby bird to fly that far, having never been trained for anything,” he said.
Although race season has officially ended for old birds, Blue is gearing up for the young bird competitions, which kick off Aug. 11 in Indiana and run through October. You’ll find him out back. Talking to his birds. Feeding them. And adding tonic to their daily water supply.
And on some summer mornings, he opens the cages and sets them free. Because for Blue, there’s nothing more satisfying.
“Just sittin’ here and waiting on the birds to come home, there’s nothing like it,” he said. “That’s the biggest thrill of it. Having them come home.”
