Residents in Merritt and Logan Lake have been finding lost painted pigeons for several years, and the City of Merritt has done something about it.

The birds are high-flying racing pigeons that can lose their flocks and end up wandering around getting run over in traffic or killed by predators, or roosting and pooping in backyards.

During a June 23 council meeting, Merritt passed a motion to amend an animal bylaw to ban the release of pigeons in the city, something other cities in the Lower Mainland have already done.

“These birds have been coming here for a couple of years now and the owners are from the coast,” said resident Tracy Medway in a previous interview with iNFOnews.ca. “We have a local group that thinks these guys may need more training to figure out what they’re doing wrong.

“It’s sad because a lot of birds perish because we have a lot of predator birds here that will pick on them.”

There are numerous accounts on social media from Merritt residents finding dead pigeons and of people coming onto their properties to fetch their lost birds.

A pigeon with blue paint on it's tail feather in a cardboard box. — This painted pigeon was found in Merritt in July. SUBMITTED/Jeramy Mullin

“(The updated bylaw) is coming at a good time because… we’ve had four pigeon deaths in our neighbourhood,” city councillor Yvette Baxter said at the June meeting. “The cargo van that showed up full of pigeons with no air conditioning… was a little bit troubling. This is now becoming very rampant.”

Baxter said her neighbour had their back gate opened by the “pigeon people” while their children were playing in their backyard. She said other neighbours almost had fights because they found people in their back yards.

“I will let you know I’ve had two other communities, since this bylaw has been brought forward, wanting to know how we go with it because they probably will be enacting the exact same thing,” Merritt mayor Michael Goetz said at the meeting.

The sport of pigeon racing

The sport of racing pigeons is popular in many countries around the world and there are roughly 20,000 registered racing pigeon lofts in North America, according to the Canadian Racing Pigeon Union.

The birds are known for their loyalty to their lofts and owners, and will race home for distances up to 600 miles per day. Clubs set race dates and distances, and provide transportation and care to their release point while race secretaries check the weather conditions to make sure it’s safe for the birds.

These birds are banded and registered. Owners expected to keep them healthy and fed regs for construction and maintenance of lofts.

The painted pigeons turning up in Merritt are not the same as registered racing pigeons. They’re high-flyers, meaning they are bred to fly at high elevations for long periods of time as opposed to flying long distances, and they are not registered with provincial or federal clubs.

Neil Caine is a long-time pigeon racer in Merritt and has a wealth of knowledge about the birds. His birds are all vaccinated and are worth thousands of dollars. He lets them out of their loft every evening for an hour.

“They’ll fly about 400 feet above the ground, racing around and then come whipping back in for food and water,” he said. “They are truly amazing and unique animals.”

The high-flying pigeons

Caine said he’s against the annual release of the high-flying painted pigeons in Merritt.

“High flyers are an amazing pigeon. Instead of flying in a circle they climb and climb and circle around and don’t come down until they get tired,” he said. “There are competitions worldwide for them, but a group of people have been bringing in birds from another area that don’t know their way home.

“The birds go straight up about a mile high and throughout the day they come down as they weaken. They land, exhausted in people’s yards. It’s cruel and gives pigeon racing a bad name.”

Caine doesn’t plan to stop racing his pigeons saying the new broad ban on releasing pigeons in Merritt is due to a general lack of understanding about the sport.

According to the amended animal control bylaw adopted on July 7 regarding the keeping of pigeons, no one with a pigeon is allowed to release it from a location outside of their property, to let it perch, roost, nest or stray on land outside their property, or to let it stray or feed on public highways and public places. Violators could face fines up to $2,000.

It isn’t clear exactly who is releasing the high-flying birds, but time will tell if the new bylaw puts an end to the practise in Merritt.