Off-course pigeon rescued in Comox
He was dispatched into the skies on a May day in Sapporo with the simple expectation that he would excel in a 1,000km race against 8,000 of his feathered ilk.
Instead, this Japanese racing pigeon crossed the Pacific ocean and turned up almost a month later on the Canadian Forces Base Comox near Courtenay, B.C. — an illegal alien in Canada and a threat to his species’s reputation of superior directional skills once relied upon to carry messages between military camps.
The bird was discovered on June 6, more than 7,000 km off target, and so tired that he could no longer fly or even protest much when a volunteer for the Mountainaire Avian rescue Society scooped him up and got him medical help.
“This pigeon definitely was released in Japan on the 10th of May. Now, how he made his way across the Pacific we’re not sure,” said Maj Birch, the society’s founder, manager and rehabilitator.
Maybe a strong wind storm picked him up in its gale and blew him to Vancouver Island, she said. There’s also a strong possibility that he landed on a ship or “hopscotched” across multiple vessels.
“The fact that he was found at CFB Comox — maybe he caught a plane. We don’t know. He’s not telling us.”
The bird was significantly underweight and carried parasites, a test of its feces at the rescue society showed. But, kept in isolation and fed a medicine-laced type of food often given to turkeys to help kill the parasite, he soon doubled his weight and kicked the parasites.
The bird’s rescuers tracked down the pigeon’s origins thanks to two bands around each ankle. One had the name and number of its owner, Hiroyasu Takasu, who was shocked to learn that his bird had made a trans-Pacific flight.
“I was so relieved he was found alive,” the owner of more than 100 other birds told ABC News. “Birds usually reach their limit in a week, with no food or water ... this is a superior pigeon.”
That said, Mr. Takasu is having the bird stay in Canada, partly because he doesn’t think further air travel would be good for the bird’s health.
This, however, posed a bit of an “awkward” problem for Ms. Birch and her team. She waited until its strength was up a bit before reporting the bird to the Canada Food Inspection Agency, which needs to be notified of domesticated and farmed animals’ arrival in Canada. On the June 19, she saw a CFIA vet who essentially asked, “Where are his papers?”
“He said [the bird] would have been euthanized,” Ms. Birch said. But she managed to convince the vet that would not be necessary, since the bird was now healthy and being cared for.
On June 21 an official with the Mid-Island racing Club in Nanaimo, B.C. agreed to adopt the bird. Ms. Birch said he plans to breed the bird to create a “good stock” of future racing pigeons.
“From what I understand,” she said, “this pigeon’s mother won the race.”