The Black Pigeon Project – My Journey to Build a Family of Black Racing Pigeons
Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2026 9:22 pm
The Black Pigeon Project – My Journey to Build a Family of Black Racing Pigeons
First of all, thanks for inviting me onto the forum to share this project.
My name is Joe Kelly, and I race as Kelly Bros from Armagh in Northern Ireland. I have kept and raced pigeons for many years, but recently I started on a project that is a little different from anything I have done before.
The idea is simple enough: I want to build a family of beautiful black pigeons that can also race.
I have always had a particular liking for black pigeons. Over the years, though, I have found that genuinely good black racing pigeons are not always easy to find. I didn’t want to breed pigeons purely for colour. The racing ability has to be there as well.
So rather than simply crossing modern racing pigeons together and selecting for black colour, I started looking backwards into some of the old-established racing families where black pigeons were a genuine part of the family.
That search has taken me much further than I originally expected.
The Black Leus
One of the families that really caught my attention was the old Black Leus pigeons.
The more I researched them, the more interested I became. These were not pigeons created recently because somebody wanted a fashionable colour. They were an old-established racing family with their own history and identity.
My search eventually led me to the old Descheemaecker lines in Belgium, where the Leus family has been preserved.
I made contact and asked quite a few questions about the pigeons. I was told that the Leus have been kept very close to the old family and are now highly inbred. I was also advised that, of the old families they maintain, the Leus would be particularly suited to sprint racing.
Some of the old names behind the family include pigeons such as De Zwarte Baron, Japanner, Vale Mazout and Verstekeling, with the history of the family going back through the old Belgian bloodlines associated with Domien Steppe.
That was when the project began to become much more serious in my mind.
The Marcelis Connection
During my research I also became very interested in the old Marcelis pigeons.
I was told something that particularly interested me: while the Leus were considered excellent sprint pigeons, the Marcelis family had maintained a broader genetic base and was regarded as a particularly strong breeding family.
The advice I received was that Leus × Marcelis could be a very interesting cross.
That fitted perfectly with what I was trying to achieve.
Rather than depending on one very inbred family, I could preserve the Leus as a family in their own right, preserve the Marcelis separately, and eventually test carefully selected crosses between them.
The old Marcelis family also has some great historical names behind it, including Geeloog, Sprint, Donkere 12 and Wringer.
Then Came the Jules Severi Blacks
Another family I have been trying to find is the old Jules Severi black pigeons.
These have proven more difficult to obtain.
Recently, I tried to buy a pair of Severi pigeons when they became available, but they sold almost immediately. I tried again when more became available, and once again they were gone almost instantly.
Whether my talking about these old black families on Facebook has helped create a little more interest in them, I don’t know—but it certainly seems that I am not the only person looking for them now!
The search continues.
This is only the beginning. I don’t know exactly where the project will lead or how many years it will take, but that is really the reason I have decided to document it from the start. Hopefully, a few years from now, we can look back through this thread and see how the family developed—from the first research and foundation pigeons right through to the race basket.
First of all, thanks for inviting me onto the forum to share this project.
My name is Joe Kelly, and I race as Kelly Bros from Armagh in Northern Ireland. I have kept and raced pigeons for many years, but recently I started on a project that is a little different from anything I have done before.
The idea is simple enough: I want to build a family of beautiful black pigeons that can also race.
I have always had a particular liking for black pigeons. Over the years, though, I have found that genuinely good black racing pigeons are not always easy to find. I didn’t want to breed pigeons purely for colour. The racing ability has to be there as well.
So rather than simply crossing modern racing pigeons together and selecting for black colour, I started looking backwards into some of the old-established racing families where black pigeons were a genuine part of the family.
That search has taken me much further than I originally expected.
The Black Leus
One of the families that really caught my attention was the old Black Leus pigeons.
The more I researched them, the more interested I became. These were not pigeons created recently because somebody wanted a fashionable colour. They were an old-established racing family with their own history and identity.
My search eventually led me to the old Descheemaecker lines in Belgium, where the Leus family has been preserved.
I made contact and asked quite a few questions about the pigeons. I was told that the Leus have been kept very close to the old family and are now highly inbred. I was also advised that, of the old families they maintain, the Leus would be particularly suited to sprint racing.
Some of the old names behind the family include pigeons such as De Zwarte Baron, Japanner, Vale Mazout and Verstekeling, with the history of the family going back through the old Belgian bloodlines associated with Domien Steppe.
That was when the project began to become much more serious in my mind.
The Marcelis Connection
During my research I also became very interested in the old Marcelis pigeons.
I was told something that particularly interested me: while the Leus were considered excellent sprint pigeons, the Marcelis family had maintained a broader genetic base and was regarded as a particularly strong breeding family.
The advice I received was that Leus × Marcelis could be a very interesting cross.
That fitted perfectly with what I was trying to achieve.
Rather than depending on one very inbred family, I could preserve the Leus as a family in their own right, preserve the Marcelis separately, and eventually test carefully selected crosses between them.
The old Marcelis family also has some great historical names behind it, including Geeloog, Sprint, Donkere 12 and Wringer.
Then Came the Jules Severi Blacks
Another family I have been trying to find is the old Jules Severi black pigeons.
These have proven more difficult to obtain.
Recently, I tried to buy a pair of Severi pigeons when they became available, but they sold almost immediately. I tried again when more became available, and once again they were gone almost instantly.
Whether my talking about these old black families on Facebook has helped create a little more interest in them, I don’t know—but it certainly seems that I am not the only person looking for them now!
The search continues.
This is only the beginning. I don’t know exactly where the project will lead or how many years it will take, but that is really the reason I have decided to document it from the start. Hopefully, a few years from now, we can look back through this thread and see how the family developed—from the first research and foundation pigeons right through to the race basket.
