It's tipping down with rain, the birds have been fed and cleaned out, and are all closed up with the lights on. So it's a good chance to sit and put a few thoughts down about this.
It's not as simple as saying that we race in the winter in Oz., it's a big country, and the climate ranges from tropical up the top end, to cold and wet winters down the south east where I live. In the north winter racing is essential, the heat would be too hard on them in the summer.
In the south, they got into the habit of racing in the winter to avoid the summer heat, but for the last couple of decades at least it has really not needed. The weather has been mild and pleasant well into the spring every year.
I am a little bit different some some blokes around here in that I breed my young birds in the spring and let them go through the moult in the autumn. By now they are mostly up on their 8th or 9th or last flight and are more or less yearlings. Other blokes tend to breed them later in the spring and summer. Then they use the darkness, or more often the lightness system to stop them moulting, One bloke I know has lights on an automatic timer so they have 12 hours of light every day. even though it is the middle of winter.
Many just race them to the perch, as they are still very young. Mine are still all together, and not many of them are showing interest in pairing up. There are 3 or 4 pairs of young birds in the small boxes in the corners paired up and cooing away at each other, but they aren't showing any signs of nesting or anything. In a week when the days start getting longer they will.
There is one little cock bird who was bred in the little stock shed. A few weeks ago he started putting himself back in there and fighting the stock cocks for a nest box.
Then a scruffy little stray turned up and he fell in love with it.
I was forever kicking them out of the shed. In the finish I gave up and put a cardboard box with a nest bowl in it up on top of the stock boxes. in 10 seconds they were in there and he's been good as gold.
I will race him to his card board box and scruffy little hen. He goes good, too. Had all the tosses and been on the drop every time.
