Poland boasts Europe's biggest community of homing pigeon breeders but fails to compete with other countries like Belgium and The Netherlands.
"My birds are athletes. You have to train the pigeons to get them into shape, monitor their health, feed them well," says pigeon fancier Michal Trojczak while opening one of his many cages. More than 70 dusty-blue pigeons take flight, soaring high above snow-covered fields in Królewiec, around 45 km eastern Warsaw.
Released hundreds of kilometers from their pigeon lofts, the birds find their way home thanks to an ability to detect the earth's magnetic field and orient themselves according to the sun. The birds can reach up to 120 kilometers per hour. Pigeon lofts are a part of Poland's landscape especially in the mining region of Silesia, where pigeon breeding has historic roots, and the birds enjoy near-mythic status.
After a day underground, it's still common to see miners emerge into the daylight, scanning the skies for their winged friends. "With more than 40,000 members, we're the largest organization of its kind in Europe, founded more than 100 years ago," said Krzysztof Kawaler, head of the Polish association of homing pigeon breeders. "We take home the most prizes at international competitions," he noted.
France and Belgium -- where pigeon fancying has deep roots -- have around 10,000 and 13,000 breeders respectively, according to their associations.
Every country holds its own local races in which the pigeons are equipped with electronic rings to record their flight time. The results are calculated across the countries using coefficients that notably take into account the number of participating pigeons. "But it doesn't reflect the pigeons' actual worth," Michal Trojczak stresses, lamenting that Polish pigeon fanciers are still viewed as amateurs in Western Europe.
"On the Polish market, pigeons go for between 250 zlotys (around 55 euros) and four, five or even six thousand zlotys for those that participate in international tournaments," said Zbigniew Oleksiak, veteran breeder for 30 years.
In Western Europe, however, prices start at around 200 euros but can go sky high, like the Belgian pigeon, Armando, bought by a Chinese breeder for 1.25 million euros at auction in 2019. The following year, New Kim, another Belgian female bird sold for 1.6 million euros for a Chinese buyer too. Like racehorses, it is the pedigree -- the bird's family tree -- that matters to buyers, especially those from Asia. Poland suffers a serious shortage in this pedigree.
Trojczak said he had turned professional after retiring a few years ago. He teamed up with a friend and bought Belgian pigeons with prestigious pricey pedigrees. “When you have to prep the birds for a race, sometimes I'll be up and running at 4:00 a.m. and won't finish till 9:00 p.m., in spring and summer days,” he said.
He now sells around 100 pigeons a year at prices ranging from 100 to 2,500 euros, which allows him to "live quite comfortably when combined with my military pension.” The former soldier expects Polish fanciers to become able to compete Belgian and Dutch breeders within 10 years. But he also expected the number of breeders to drop by half.
