I only flew sprint in the 80s and I agree with this straight from A to B if you are sprinting. But Ads view the birds are losing their confidence may not be true in many cases (hawks ect). Because I flew the distance my birds were allowed a less strict regime when trapping from training.(this never affected them when racing) I would often take them training and I thought the birds were taking a long time coming from training. They would sometimes take a hour or more from 20 miles. Then one day my wife said the birds had ALREADY returned and gone off again! When I found this out I then asked her to write down the time they arrived home IF she saw them, she wasn't that interested really.Murray wrote: Thu May 02, 2024 6:48 am Famous Dutch racer Ad Schaerlaeckens is quite blunt about it.
He describes the idea that youngsters taking a long time to fly a short toss being 'good for them' is utter nonsense. All that is happening is they are losing their confidence.
He is a wise old head and makes the observation that years ago you could jump them out to ten miles and then 20 miles and all would be good. For reasons we don't understand if you try that these days you stand a better than average chance of having a crash training toss and lose most of them.
I totally agree. If they beat me home from, say, 7 miles, great![]()
I will take them back there next time just to reinforce the lesson. And so on out the road in easy stages.
I know blokes who have always gone way out for the first toss. They don't tell you much,but they aren't doing it now.....
![]()
The reason the birds probably did this is because my birds were used to flying up to 2hrs a day. And because of working shifts I didn't want them back in the loft having only flown say 15-20 mins when training. I used to start training my birds some 8 weeks before the first race and trained every 2 or 3 days. By doing this my birds still flew 1-2 hrs everyday. In the last 4 years before I stopped racing I could count on one hand the number of YBs I lost training. I started at 7 miles and they were at 20 miles the fourth toss. I've never been the best YB flyer in my area, I won and got cards in a few, but sent them for education and fed them to just get them home rather than win, but NOBODY around me raced YBs further than me, and they still haven't.
Now back to Ads view about late birds losing their confidence. I recall taking them training one day and was unsure if they had returned already and gone off again? They had been gone for near on 2 hours when a single bird returned and after it trapped I noticed it had a broken leg. All the others return some 20mins later. So far from losing confidence it was clear the birds didn't return because they happy still flying. The bird with the broken leg returned simply because it was injured and not lacking confidence.
This approach to training YBs wouldn't probably suit most, but it worked for me.


