Diamond Dave wrote: Fri Aug 28, 2026 11:11 pm
So shall we move on to discuss the problem of CLASHING now.
Does anyone have any ideas on how we can prevent this.
The problem has been around for a long time but even with technology it still seems to affect our y.bird racing.
It seems that with birds going North to South and vice versa and East to West and vice versa and sometimes only a small window of opportunity to liberate it seems somewhat inevitable.
I know that the race controllers do a brilliant job but when there is only a small window it becomes a difficult and thankless task.
Is it more important to get the birds away than hold over nowadays. I have never known our club/fed to have a holdover when it was always a fairly common practise maybe 15 -20 years ago, usually for the weather but now we just put racing back til the next day but if then you only have that short window all the birds will be in the air at the same time.
Could more thought be put into it by staging libs when the weather is good. Maybe going with perhaps east to west between say 6 - 8am and then West to East at perhaps 8 - 10pm and similarly North to South and South to North.
It is the first 2 or 3 y.bird races that are probably the most vulnerable but they are usually fairly short so a 2 hour window for any particular direction would allow them to get home before the opposite direction are even released. Does anyone think that would work or have any other thoughts or comments......
Well Dave, many including yourself will probably not agree with my views on this. I believe ' True clashing' very rarely happens. Now that's not to say birds don't get mixed together. A flock of pigeons from a liberation, even when strung out occupy a very small piece of the sky. Do fanciers really think flocks just happen to meet each other when racing most weeks? Now, when do birds actually get mixed together? Well the main cause and the one many wrongly claim to be 'clashing' is at the liberation point. On certain days you get liberation sites where Feds flying in different directions are at the SAME race point. When this happens I believe birds get mixed when not enough time is given between liberations, I've heard many times libs have happened when birds of the previous lib have not cleared. This can happen also if race points are very close together. Now if the birds are going in the same direction that's better but, your still going to get a bad race because something was wrong at the race point already if the birds failed to clear, if the birds are going in different directions that's just makes the problem even worse. How many times have fanciers had birds reported that are either very close to where they were liberated, or reported by a fancier who was himself racing or racing close to the SAME place your bird was? Now for birds reported many miles away from the point, they were probably ALREADY LOST before they followed another bird, who themselves were probably lost.
Now technology is USELESS. It works for aircraft but is useless for pigeons. Same as GPS TRACKING. It tells you the route the BIRD CHOSE to take, you can learn little from it, because the bird CAN'T be trained to take a different route. These apps that show libs and lines of flights, are very mis-leading, they show a thick line which is totally out of scale. These lines would be miles wide if to scale, and even at the point they cross each other the actual flock could be miles apart. And the actual crossing point is only valid if the CORRECT speed, wind & height was known?
Back to 'clashing' birds in different winds normally fly at different heights, now I've said a race flock takes up a very small piece of sky. Even if a chance meeting with a another flock they'd all most certainly pass each other at different heights.
Pigeons when on route take some splitting up. Every fancier must have see their own team of YBs exercising at home and join another local flock, when they've had enough flying together the vast majority will simply break away and the two packs split like magic, you may have a couple of his and he may have a couple of yours but pigeons within a flock rarely get split.
I was at a lib at Wetherby and watched a single pigeon flying across the lib site, just as it reached the transporter the birds were released right in front of it. I watched in amazement as it flew straight though the entire lib and out the other side. It didn't break its line at all, it's as though it didn't even see them.
I know I've probably not convinced those who believe in 'clashing' but it's something that never bothered me. If you train a bird correctly you should have every faith in it finding it's way home even it meets other pigeons, I always let my YBs out on race days, and even trained them on race days. If there any good, they'll return. If they don't nobody should try to find a reason to justify why they didn't. You can tell yourself it was clashing, BOP, wires ect, but if you don't know for sure your guessing. I lost my fair share of YBs racing, but probably less than most. The last thing I wanted was them reporting. I was lucky I didn't get many reported, the ones I did were rarely by another fancier, they were normally by joe public, picked up flown out. I'd rather a lost bird of mine live out, and return under it's own steam, even if that was many weeks, months or even years which some actually did.
PS if anybody still believes 'clashing' is real. Don't fly in the Nationals, especially YB Nationals. The birds start the race clashed.
