Got three new homer pigeons

[Bird_man]

I had my homers for about 6 days now they are starting to warm up to me I’m getting them used to a feed call I want to try and let them free range in about a month 2 are younger birds still have little yellow fuzz and one is an adult what y’all think is it safe to attempt to free range em in a month? Thanks

 

[sourland]

If the adult has been flown, I would hesitate to fly it unless I was willing to lose it. Place a settling cage (that allows access to the loft), allow them access to this cage, and then you should be able to initiate flying them after a month or so. I always used a cage that was on the landing platform but also allowed access to the loft roof. Good luck. Understand that many young birds are lost to hawks until they become 'hawk savvy'.

 

[Quacking Pigeon]

I had my homers for about 6 days now they are starting to warm up to me I’m getting them used to a feed call I want to try and let them free range in about a month 2 are younger birds still have little yellow fuzz and one is an adult what y’all think is it safe to attempt to free range em in a month? Thanks

If you have a pair you should let them raise a few batches of young and then allow them to go out, but there’s still a chance they could fly away.

 

[LamarshFish]

I had my homers for about 6 days now they are starting to warm up to me I’m getting them used to a feed call I want to try and let them free range in about a month 2 are younger birds still have little yellow fuzz and one is an adult what y’all think is it safe to attempt to free range em in a month? Thanks

For the youngsters that still have yellow fuzz, once you notice them freely entering the aviary on their own to look around at their surroundings, I'd let them do that for about a week. At each interval of this training process, your birds are memorizing what they are looking at, sort of "downloading" images into their photographic memory of "home". Next, train them to use whatever door (be it a bob door or open door) you want them to be able to enter in and out of the loft with by using a settling cage over it (i.e., the cage covers the outside so they are able to go in and out of the door, but they won't escape because the settling cage blocks them). Do this for another week. You'll notice the youngsters end up hanging in that settling cage as well, which is good, they are downloading more images and familiarizing themselves with views of "home". Make sure you have evidence that all of them understand how to exit and re-enter, and also have evidence that each youngster has spent some time in the settling cage. If you notice some aren't going in there, you might step in and put them in yourself. Next, you should let them out by simply opening the door. If you do what I said above correctly, starting today (thus only two weeks of the aforementioned training processes), these youngsters will still be at an age where they will not just take off and fly, because they physically can't yet. This is a huge young bird training advantage for you. Instead of being able to fly, they should just flutter about. Plus, they likely won't have the confidence to just take off yet. They will likely stay on your landing board (you should have a landing board attached to your loft entry), or at most hang on the roof of your loft. This is good, because they continue to download images of home, as well as get bearings of where the door is when they flutter about their surroundings. After a few days you'll notice they might go a bit further, such as the telephone wires or maybe the roof of your home if it's close to your loft. Keep letting them out (evening, with 2-3 hours of light left of the day is best) each evening until you start noticing they gain confidence to fly around fast around your loft. Then experiment with giving them more like 4-6 hours of time out there, and once you notice that they disappear out of sight for more than 30 minutes, and still come back to home, you can be pretty sure they have become dialed in and are ready to be true homers, because then they have flown up high and literally downloaded images of everything, for miles. At this point, if you want to, they should be ready to be trained on tosses at 1 mile, 2 miles, 5 miles, 10, 20 and so on. If loft flying is all you want to do, you can just keep doing that with them.

Even with what I've said above, even if you do it all right, you might still have some losses. It happens. My experience also is that losses are greater if you get the birds from another loft and they aren't born in your loft, even if you get them at the right age where they still have the yellow fuzzy down feathers on them. That has just been my observation though.

Don't fly the adult. Wait until it has raised 3-4 clutches of young before you fly it, and even then there is a risk it does not home.

 

[laughingdog]

Maybe keep older one up and or try to find it a mate once can guess it's sex hopefully, as I've had older birds take young ones home with them. GoiG luck!