First race

[Steve Howells]

Also Dave Steve races natural very well from the longer races
Now he posted the other day his birds are on youngsters but doing 45 mins a day
So natural doesn’t mean they won’t fly
He clearly has the pigeons under his command . I think first you might need to get a routine going with them

The easier way to get them to fly is to split the sex and no nest once you have them doing 40-60 min each you can then adapt back into the natural system
Shane use to let his cocks out when off the nest and hens the same they both did a hour or had a 35/40 mile training toss so that might be worth thinking about to get them split and flying then work the loft flying around the time one sex is off the nest

Open hole can and does have a certain place and can be successful - but I think only under certain conditions

If I were to start racing again would I do open hole for sprint or even the distance - hell no

I'm a control freak and I need to be in control of absolutely everything


However, I do have some involvement in a project at present that's proving really successful - and that has a large element of open hole

I deliberately steer clear of many of these conversations simply because lots of people have very strong opinions and that’s fine. 2022 was the first year back North for me with a team of yearlings, that year I was working from home most of the time and for me nothing gives me greater pleasure than watching the pigeons fly, so as I was there I used open hole a lot, and won 8 old bird races, ok they were only club races with between 10-12 members sending, but the birds were there most weeks. What I did notice about them that year was that there were always one or two birds in the air, it was unusual not to see any flying and the ones that weren’t tended to be in the loft. Had they spent all their time on the house roofs or walking the garden I would have shut them up but that wasn’t the case, it really surprised me how much time they spent flying.

[Diamond Dave]

Brilliant Mike. Those guys are AWESOME!
(50 x combine wins - incredible record) I wish you well with it.
- Is that thier only target? Id love to follow your progress and it would be good if you could post the stages prior to those big events.
Good luck to you and those lads.