How do I train my homing pigeons to come back to there coop

[Misfits Farm 92]

No I do not plan to let the others out with the homers.

 

[cavemanrich]

Your non homers should be able to be Loft flied. Since they do not have a homing desire to their original Loft. If they do,,,,,,,,, most likely will not be able to find it. There are exceptions.
All depending on your desires as to how you want to keep your pigeons. Caged all their life,,,,,, or free-flight.
If you choose free,,,,, then let the 4 non-homers out of their cage hungry. Contain your 2 homers separately. Your quartet may fly out onto the rooftops, look around, and return into loft to eat. Do this as a training so they know their home.
You can do same with your homers, but only let one out at a time, and hungry as well. When both are semi homeset, then you can chance letting both out. If pigeons are young, and have not been flown out of their birth loft, they will stay with you.
If pigeons are questionable on returning,,,, I suggest having them confined until they brood a few squabs for you. At that point,,,,, they may decide to stay even though they are mature and still remember their old loft. If they split on you,,,,, well you have the young that will stay with you.
Here are 2 threads that are quite active with plenty of info on them just for the reading of posts.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/pigeon-bulletin-board.1174207/
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/pigeon-talk.1276029/
Come and hang out there and learn from many good pigeon fanciers.
WISHING YOU BEST,,,,,,,,,, and

 

[backyard pigeons]

Oh and also, never fly a bird you cant afford to lose!

 

[Misfits Farm 92]

Ok

 

[LamarshFish]

The following steps are how I settle and loft train my homers, and should work for any flying breed, with the exception of the last step which only applies to homers.

First step, settle the birds. If you get young birds from another loft I would plan on a 2-3 week settling period, where you do not let them out. If the young birds were born in your loft, I would observe them around the 5-6 week mark, at which point they should be confident enough to be marching around the loft and spending time looking around in the aviary. For young birds born in another loft, this is a time for them to get used to the loft, and download images of the surroundings by viewing from the aviary and settling cage. Ideally, your bob door and settling cage will sit just above your avairy, thereby making the top of the aviary your landing board, but it's not a big deal if you can't build it like that, it just makes it easier if it is. Once you notice your birds freely entering the aviary on their own to look around at their surroundings, I'd let them continue to do that for about a week. At each interval of this training process, your birds are memorizing what they are looking at, literally "downloading" images into their photographic memory of what "home" is. 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. (If you use one-way bobs, at first keep the bob wires all the way up, then after a few days drop just one bob wire, get them used to that (it gets them used to touching the metal as they go in and out), then drop a few more bob wires, until you get them to the point where you can drop all of them, at which point you'll actually have to place them into the settling cage from outside since they can't get in with all bob wires down--at this point, they will be forced to use the full bob door in order to get back in the loft. That's also the reason you want to build a small door on the outside of your settling cage.) 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 just one bird isn't confident using the bobs, that could keep that bird outside in the future, and may be lost. If you notice some aren't going in there, you might step in and put them in yourself, forcing them to learn to re-enter the loft through the bobs.

Second, first freedom. Next, you should let them out by simply opening the door. This is very important. With birds born in your loft, you should be at this stage early enough that they aren't strong on the wing enough just to take off, but for young birds obtained from another loft , you need to be careful since they WILL be strong on the wing. For these birds, I recommend soaping their wings the first 2-3 times you give them freedom (see YouTube vids of it, just a light soap and water solution in a 5 gal bucket, dunk their wings for 20-30 seconds until soaked). Because you have to do this, you can choose whether you soap the wings and place them back in side and let them exit on their own time, or you can simply place them on the landing board yourself, right after you're done soaping their wings. With wet, soapy wings, stead of being able to fly, they should just flutter about. They likely won't have the confidence to just take off yet, but if they did there is a good chance they'll fly too far and not come back. 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 (but sometimes they may stick around for a week or so, just be patient, it's different for each bird). 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. You know you're ready for basic training to be over once you notice that they disappear out of sight for more than 30 minutes or so, and still come back to home, at which point you can be pretty sure they have become dialed in and are ready to be true homers. This is because they have flown up high and literally downloaded images of everything, for miles, or at least should have. 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. For safe measures, you might loft fly them a few more times, but in theory, after one trip of disappearing for some time, they should be ready for tosses. If loft flying is all you want to do, you can just keep doing that with them. If you want to train them on tosses, away from home, make sure at each mile interval you do a few tosses as a group, and then also release them in singles a few minutes apart from each other, so they have individual confidence flying alone, because it is possible some birds are simply following others without having individually memorized their routes. Once a bird is trained to a certain mileage, which varies between 20-30 miles depending on who you speak to, most agree that the bird is ready to go as far as their genetics will let them go (i.e., for a bird you have no clue what their pedigree is, I wouldn't exceed 50 miles, but for a homer from a proven racing line, it could be as far as 600 miles or more).

So, basically it is this:

(1) settle to aviary and settling cage (for YBs born in loft, they do this on their own)
(2) train to use bob doors
(3) train to sit on landling board and observe, without being strong on wing
(4) train to loft fly strong on wing
(5) train remote tosses (BUT DO NOT DO THIS WITH NON-HOMING BREEDS)

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. But the above steps should greatly mitigate losses.

 

[cavemanrich]

well described @LamarshFish
Now go treat those blisters on fingertips from typing

 

[LamarshFish]

well described @LamarshFish
Now go treat those blisters on fingertips from typing

Admittedly, I just cut and pasted (and very slightly edited) directions I had sent to a young man who I helped start a loft this past summer with some of my YBs. My instructions helped him, and successfully settled them, so I figured it was worthy of posting!

 

[biophiliac]

Admittedly, I just cut and pasted (and very slightly edited) directions I had sent to a young man who I helped start a loft this past summer with some of my YBs. My instructions helped him, and successfully settled them, so I figured it was worthy of posting!

You are a credit to the sport my friend.

 

[Crzytrkr]

well if it where me i would set them loose hungry, but when feeding always shake a can of seed or gravel this tells them feeding time and when you want them to come back too the coop shake the heck outa that can! It works!.....