Young pigeon fanciers: meet the new kids on the flock

‘People often don’t see them as living things’: Hannah Hall, who went viral on TikTok with Penny the pigeon.‘People often don’t see them as living things’: Hannah Hall, who went viral on TikTok with Penny the pigeon.

For now, Callum and Serena are fancy birders – they keep their frilled, coloured and crested feathered friends for the sheer pleasure of appreciating their looks. But next year, when the couple buy their own home, they would like to start exhibiting at shows. That means upstaging Boris and co with some purer-breed pigeons, such as frillbacks with more erect frills or capuchines with elaborate, super-fluffy head crests.

Nicknamed “pigeon girl” in her home town of Magheralin, County Down, Keelie decided to stay close to home for her undergraduate degree, so she could spend her weekends mucking out the loft of more than 200 pigeons she shares with her father and grandad. All of the birds are related and bred down from a Belgian fast-racing line of Heremans-Ceusters that her dad first bought in the 2000s.

Fellow racer Trent Lightfoot, 15, runs a one-loft race for owners under the age of 16 from his family home in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Fifty-five young bird owners have entered his Northwest Junior One Loft Race in its inaugural year, for £50 an entry. The birds race back to the loft from “hotspots” in Marlborough, Worcester and Stow on the Wold. Trent and his mum, Lisa Lightfoot, have secured sponsorship from seed companiesto reduce the birds’ upkeep costs.

“People are unkind towards pigeons and don’t see them as living things,” Hall says. The NHS worker is campaigning for measures to reduce the plastic and fishing litter that can wrap around birds’ necks, and a ban on anti-pigeon spikes in UK cities. Due to conflict with humans, town pigeons live an average of four years, whereas loft-kept pigeons live up to the age of 20.

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