Being part of a strong and very social pigeon club once again, I've had numerous conversations with some very good fliers, one of the topics was on selection. We all have our ways of deciding what has to go and what stays, even if like me, you are too soft and just keep building bigger sheds to house all those birds you can't get rid of lol
Since starting up with birds again in 2016 I have once again ended up with far too many birds and don't have the space to keep doing that so each year some birds sadly do have to move on. They do however need to be really useless or not in the best of health for me to make that decision, I'd rather lose them on the road where possible.
Now one members methods of selection struck me as being such a simple yet clever idea. All he does is score every bird in his race team with the position they arrive from each race they have, at the end of the season he will add all these points together and divide it by the amount of races they've had, this becomes their score. The 20 birds with the lowest score will go back in the race loft, everything else goes.
Now bearing in mind, this member will often take the first half a dozen or more positions in the club and federation, and that many of these birds would have won themselves if not for loft mates and often just a quicker trap, a lot of the birds he gets rid of each year are still better than the best many of us have in entire lofts
He won't sell his birds but does like to help the novice, or like me, someone who is just looking to improve their own stock so will try to find homes for these birds where he can. I applied the same method to my own team last season and the results are very useful, both in selecting which my better racers should be and who my better breeders potentially are too. I've still not managed to move many on though so will have a large race team again
but it has definitely helped me be more selective with my breeding. So I'm interested in hearing what others do
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