Big Joe and I passed these two rooftop pigeon coops at opposite ends of Bed-Stuy, and watched in wonder as the flocks of pigeons circled the sky. Apparently a popular American pastime, I've only ever associated pigeon keeping with New York's mafioso, Sonny Black. But if you want to know more, plenty has been written about Brooklyn's pigeon fanciers. According to an article in the NY Times pigeon racing is becoming too expensive and as a sport is dying out:
In the 1950's, it was hard to walk down a street in Bensonhurst or Coney Island without a flock of pigeons twinkling in the sky like a handful of falling dimes. The last 50 years, however, have been tough on the pigeon game. Teams have disbanded; new racers are hard to find.
The sport, racers say, has gotten too expensive. They spend as much as $10,000 a year on entry fees, E. coli medication, handmade coops and specially blended feeds. That's not to mention computerized clocks, veterinary visits and travel to training grounds.
I found great photo essays and feature articles in two magazines. the Morning News:
Photo: The war isn’t just a race of distance. Not even the same pigeons are used. The war is a lower-stakes continuation of a game once played in Modena, Italy, called the Triganieri (where the losers’ birds were killed) and a relative of a game still played in the Turkish city of Urfa (involving over 500 flocks of birds). The Brooklyn Pigeon Wars, as they call it, is an aerial social casino. To play, a coop owner releases all or a portion of his pigeons, letting them fly freely in a flock over Brooklyn, meeting up with similar flocks released by other owners. An intricate dance ensues. The flocks intermix. No one knows what actually happens in bird-speak up there in the sky, but perhaps the pigeons are saying to each other, “What’s up. Like my style? We got a real happening crib. Great view. Come back home with us and we’ll show you where it’s at.” At a certain point the flocks turn homeward, arriving lesser or greater in number than they started out. A captured bird’s fate depends on the victorious owner. It might be kept and trained to fly with the new flock, or it might be ransomed. A coop owner might lose half his flock in one night, while others gain as many. This is how birds are lost and won.While Caleb Neelon writes about Bushwick's Pigeon Mumbler in Swindle Magazine:
And Artist Zina Saunders has interviews and portraits of the Rooftop Pigeon Guys on her website, Overlooked New York:Pigeon-keeping is a pastime in many parts of the world, but it has a special place in New York City’s outer boroughs. Come each May, the skies of Brooklyn fill with clouds of pigeons sent up by their keepers. The flocks move tightly in spirals, and though pigeons may individually be low on the order of beauty in the birding world, their movement in formation is an inspiring sight. With each tight turn, a different part of the bird presents itself to view, shifting color and giving an iridescent, morphing appearance to the hundreds of birds that fly together in flock formation. The flying birds are hypnotic, and they had young Mike so entranced that he began tending pigeons on his own rooftop. Mike wasn’t satisfied to keep just one or two, either. “By the time I got to be 15, I was holding down a thousand birds in my coops.”
So, how does a young teenager come to own a thousand pigeons? “Well, back then a lot of the guys that kept pigeons were old white men, Germans and Irish around here, and, well, they didn’t keep no locks on their coops,” Mike trails off a bit, smiling. “And the only people in those days that stole around here were Blacks and Puerto Ricans like myself.” Mike would run up to the old men’s rooftops, duck down into their coops, and hurriedly grab birds one after another, stuffing them into a laundry sack. He’d heave the sack off the side of the building, usually one of the three-floor walkups so common to Brooklyn, and walk out empty-handed. Collecting the sack at the ground level, he’d pull out the unlucky birds that broke the others’ falls and introduce the survivors to his coop.
Orlando, age 45, and his wife Omayra, age 24, raise pigeons on their roof in Brooklyn, and enter races all season long. His lifelong passion for pigeons began with the windowsill pigeon coop he made as a boy.
