Overkill?

At every competition the athletes try to do their best. That some help out with performance-enhancing products is normal in my opinion, it has always been this way. Which doesn’t mean that I regard Doping as a good thing, but there are also natural performance-enhancing substances, and those I think are ok.

Now we go from the athletes to the Tipplers and their flying competitions. If we are honest: everyone participating in those competitions hopes that his pigeons fly the longest. Therefore it is quite normal that one builds up his Tipplers before a competition, which means giving them performance-enhancing food and natural and legal substances like for example corn sugar, yeast, oil-containing grains or capsules with peanut-oil. When I talked to a mail-pigeon breeder about the preparation of my Tipplers he said: “give them lots of cannabis before the competition and they won’t land anymore during the day”. And laughed!

The next competition was on the 14.08.2010, and I wanted to start with three Tipplers willing to fly. They were three trustworthy pigeons that have escaped the peregrine falcon several times. Seven days before the competition I started with the preparation of the three young pigeons. I mixed lots of cannabis into the prep-food and in the last days before the competition I mainly gave them cannabis.

On the competition day I started the team of three at 6am. It was still a little dark but the team flew nicely packed into the day. After 10am they started to fly larger and larger loops, so that I sometimes did not see them for 10-20 minutes. They flew higher than normally as well. The longer they flew the less typical they behaved. They did not do rounds above the house anymore they just flew above it, partly in great heights; they seemed to me like mail pigeons. Slowly I doubted that those were still my three Tipplers. But since they were two blue and a white one they were definitely mine. In the meantime it was 8pm and the three did not make any attempts to do rounds above the house like usually when they wanted to land. I knew: when they continued to fly like this I wouldn’t get the three down again. It was by the way my 55. Competition and until then I had always achieved to get everybody down again. At 8.45pm they flew above the house heading north and disappeared there. After approximately 15 minutes heavy rain began to fall and there was strong wind. So I had to leave my spot on the roof and from the balcony I did not have the overview anymore. Rain and wind stayed till morning, and so this flight was disqualified.

On the next day I had to go to work early. Before that, a quick look at the roof and sky but nothing was seen of my Tipplers. After 8am my wife called to inform me that my three Tipplers were flying their rounds above the house. Now suddenly they could fly normally again.

In the following training flights they behaved like always. For me the question now was what did cause the Tipplers to fly this unusually? And why did they only start with this unusual flight after 4 hours? But probably this is only known by the pigeon themselves. My wife is convinced that the three were “high” after the heavy consumption of cannabis. Maybe I really did feed them too much cannabis, resulting in overkill.

Walter Stettler, CH Binningen, www.flugtippler.ch