The Beifuss File: Pigeon-racing police officer coos over 'feathered thoroughbreds'

John Beifuss | Memphis Commercial Appeal

Show Caption Hide Caption Feathered racers inspire local cop Stan Elkins is a pigeon racer, and after three years in the sport he hopes to start a pigeon racing club in the Memphis area.

Hope, Emily Dickinson wrote, is the thing with feathers.

Or, in this case, lots of feathers. Lots and lots of feathers.

Stan Elkins has an unusual hope. The 43-year-old police officer hopes to generate interest in his Memphis Mid-South Racing Pigeon Club, a fledgling organization that would return a centuries-old tradition to an area where racing means greyhound and pigeon means pest.

Despite cooing calls, pearlescent feathers, a record of wartime heroism, appearances in Egyptian hieroglyphics and a membranous flap atop their beaks that can resemble a Valentine’s heart, pigeons in the modern world are not always prized. Brazen and gregarious, the birds sometimes make such a flap in Downtown Memphis parks and plazas that residents and workers condemn them as “rats with wings.”

For Elkins, that’s character assassination. He refers to the pigeon as “the racehorse of the sky.”

Crockett County resident Steve Mitchell, 71, agrees. “I call them ‘feathered thoroughbreds,’ ” said the lifelong pigeon enthusiast, whose Bells, Tennessee-based Metro Racing Pigeon Club provides a model for Elkins’ plan.

Elkins — who embraced pigeons as a hobby during a long recovery from a second heart surgery three years ago — describes breeding, training and racing pigeons as “therapeutic.”

“Maybe it has something to do with me being a police officer,” said the 21-year Memphis Police veteran, who operates out of the Appling Farms Station. “As a police officer, everything is lock 'em up, put 'em behind bars, take 'em to jail. ... But now for me the favorite part of pigeon racing is letting 'em go. I get to have my own liberation. ‘This is called freedom.’ ”

Elkins lives on a cul-de-sac in a Bartlett subdivision, in a house he shares with his wife, two sons and an Amazon parrot named Pancho. If you visit, you’re liable to see a small flock of racing pigeons circling Elkins' home in an impressive aerobatic demonstration of the combination of instinct, intelligence and training that draws the birds back to their home, a loft in Elkins’ backyard, where they find food, shelter and floorboards carpeted with kitty litter, to absorb their droppings.

Larger than the typical urban chicken coop, that loft is one of two in Elkins' yard. Converted from large wooden sheds that typically would house lawnmowers, ladders and tools, the lofts — one is for racers, one is for breeding pairs of pigeons — house a total of about 100 pigeons, which belong to a breed known as "racing homers," developed in the 18th century for endurance, speed and homing instinct.

Each loft is busy with throaty pigeon calls and downy feathers, which float through the air like cottonwood seeds, but only in the breeding loft will you find nests with eggs, laid in pairs. The eggs take about 20 days to hatch, and the chicks take about a month to be weaned. After that, the birds can be moved to the racing loft.

Most of the adult pigeons resemble the birds that congregate on building ledges and plaza fountains, but a few are more exotic and can boast racing pedigrees. These include Silver Star, a glossy bird, and Elkins' favorite, Domino, a bird dappled in Dalmatian-esque black and white. If these birds have a certain value, sentimental and otherwise, they can't hold a feather to Bolt, a champion homing pigeon that sold for $400,000 to a Chinese businessman during a 2013 auction, or to Cher Ami, a pigeon that was awarded the Croix de Guerre, a French military honor, after delivering a message credited with saving some 200 soldiers during World War I.

Although the Mid-South is not exactly the Argonne, pigeons who fly Elkins' coop don't always come back. "There are lots of dangers in the world," said Elkins, citing hawks, power lines, cellphone towers and storms. Plus, "They're like kids: Some want to stay home, but some of 'em just want to go."

A pigeon racing club requires other loft owners to breed birds "for a friendly race against each other's loft," Elkins said. To that end, he has recruited several local pigeon fanciers for his club, but he admits it's slow-going. Unlike joining a book club, "It's not just something you can do overnight," he admits. To begin racing pigeons, you need, forgive the pun, a small nest egg: You have to purchase the birds, provide a place for them to live and pay for their upkeep. "Just like any other animal, you have to take care of them every day."

In this regard, Mitchell is a nice role model for pigeon enthusiasts. “I started liking pigeons when I was about four or five years old,” said the lifelong West Tennessean. “They had the shiny feathers on their neck. And they walked like a person, they didn’t hop like a lot of birds. I became fascinated with 'em.

“I ordered my first pigeons out of the Sears catalog in 1958,” he continued. “I paid four dollars and ninety-five cents for a pair. The shipping was three dollars and thirty cents, on a train.” Almost 60 years of pigeons later, “I still get as much enjoyment out of them as I did that first year.”

Mitchell refers to pigeon racing as "the invisible sport," because participants and enthusiasts can't watch the action in progress. After release, "you don't see the pigeon again until it comes back to your home loft."

In pigeon racing, a group of owners — in Mitchell's club, that means folks from Ripley, Trenton and Lexington, Tennessee, among other cities — gather with their birds, which are transported to a "liberation point." The birds are released, and they navigate their way back to their home lofts. (In popular pigeon locales such as Belgium, races can be 500 miles long.) Historically, synchronized clocks and other types of gear were used to determine pigeon speed (based on time in the air and distance traveled), but now the birds are tagged with tiny GPS devices that enable owners to precisely measure the bird's overall speed, to determine a winner.

The U.S. lacks the big-money "professional pigeon" events that can be found in Europe, Asia and South Africa; even so, the American Pigeon Racing Union, a national organization for pigeon enthusiasts, reports about 700 pigeon racing clubs across the country. Elkins hopes his club soon will take wing, to add to that number.

Whatever happens, the hobby will continue to be therapeutic. Holding Domino in his hands, the bird's throaty coo had its counterpoint in the rhythm of Elkins' artificial aortic valve. "If you take a listen," he said. "You can literally hear my heart ticking."