Can my son's white rollers find their way home if released?

[primalpotter]

My son has a pair of white rollers that fly free during the day and return home at night. There is a dedication next week of a peace garden at a school maybe three miles from here, and he would like to release them at the event, but I am worried that they might not find their way home. What do you think?

 

[92caddy]

Im willing to bet that they will find their way home, but to be safe, I would start taking them down the road toward the event and letting them loose everyday, take them a bit father everyday til you get to where you plan on letting them loose at. Thats what we do with ours when we are training them for a race..........Good luck and let us knwo how it turns out.........

 

[deerman]

Good odds they will get lost, all pigeon try to home, but only homers can find their home from far away.

When training racing homer you can jump many mile each time you release them.

If you want to train rollers out to 3 miles, afraid it would take more than a week. It can be done, but you should only take them a few block each release. Max 1/4 mile at a time ,release at each place at least 2 times.

 

[92caddy]

deerman, your are right, when I reread the the post, I saw where it said rollers, it was late at night and I just got home from work, so I missed that. Sorry I didnt mean to mis inform anyone.

 

[primalpotter]

Thanks, guys. We'll forget about it for next week, but there's a botanical garden a block away where they do lots of outdoor weddings in summer, so he's going to start training them to home from there!

 

[Mary Of Exeter]

A lot depends on how many trees are around your house, as to whether they will come back from 3 miles or not. Rollers have almost none, if any at all, homing ability. What gets them back to the loft is their ability to see the loft from the sky, or familiar things. My rollers used to get blown by the wind a bit too far, to where they were on the other side of the woods from us. Maybe half of our 5 acres are wooded. They got lost. Found one sitting on the powerline up the road looking around. Saw me, thought "food" and landed on our truck. I was able to catch it and bring it back home.

Homers are always the breed to go with when releasing outside the property. Although others may do it with some work, better safe than sorry in my opinion.

 

[seismic wonder2]

I would say, with my limited experiance with rollers (i.e.NONE) I would get a map, draw a straight line from your loft to the release point.
Then, practice release hungry birds at every point where the line crosses a street.
Hungry= motivation to return home for full dishes of food. Make sure someone is home with lots of yummy treats!!!

The many releases will give them a straight line path to to get home with familiar landmarks within sight of every release point.
This will take MUCH MORE TIME THAN A WEEK for them to learn!!!

Rollers aren't homers and they have to remember where to fly to get home