"The most important thing no one should forget is that this is a hobby and a hobby should be for fun!
The pleasure in the hobby and the friends are more important than the quality of your birds."
Heine Bijker - 4 time World Cup Roller Fly Champion
RANDOM TIPS
Tip on Settling New Birds
When you have new birds to settle, maybe new birds you bred or birds that you got from someone else, you will have to get them settled (homed) to your loft. There are many different techniques used to settle new birds. You as a flyer are going to have to figure out what technique you will use depending on your location, loft set up, birds, ect.
One major problem that I have seen/heard of is when it comes time to let the birds out for their first free flight. The problem is when the fancier has a whole kit of new birds and on the first release they let out all of the new birds at once. What happens is the birds take off for all directions and many get lost.
If you don't already have birds flying from your location than you won't be able to use this tip. But if you do have birds already settled and flying, then use those birds to help settle the new birds. Let the settled birds out and toss up a couple of the new birds into the bunch. The settled birds will help to keep the new birds in the area and hopefully they won't get lost. If the new birds are older birds that were flying at the other fanciers house it's easier to settle them this way because they already know how to kit and will usually just follow your kit. Young birds are another story as they won't usually kit at first, but with the settled birds flying it will usually keep the young birds in the area. Do this every day, adding a couple new birds each day until you got all of the new birds flying. This will help keep your losses to a minimum.
Record Keeping
I feel that it is very important to keep accurate records of the birds you breed. Especially for a performance breed like the Birmingham Roller, you need to know which birds are breeding what, good or bad.
I use both manual (written) records and a computer program to keep track of my birds. The reason for both systems is because I know that bad things can happen to electrical devices.
The computer program I use was made especially for the roller pigeon. It was created by Dave Gehrke and is called The PERFECT RECORD SYSTEM. It has portals to add performance data, health records, kit performance ect. It is a fairly easy program to input and retrieve data from. The main reason I like this program is that it is a stand alone program which is loaded onto your home computer. It is not "cloud" based or located on a server on the "net" somewhere, where at a click of the mouse you can lose access to all of your data. I can remember several years ago when there were a couple of webhosts that disappeared overnight and there were a lot of people/businesses that lost their websites, never to see all of their hard work ever again.
Unfortunately, I do not think this program is still available for purchase.
I have added 2 forms that I use for my manual record system that you are welcome to use. The first is the form I use for my breeding records. It records each individual pair along with what they produced for that year. There is a lot of space to record notes for each individual offspring. This form is two sided and when you print it you need to print the first side then flip the page 180 degrees then print the second side. That way when it is put in the 3 ring binder and you're flipping through the pages the front and back are facing the correct way.
The second form is the Individual Bird Stat. This is for keeping records for each individual bird that you breed. You can input as little or as much as you feel is necessary on this form.
Storing Feed
I like to store my feed in 5 gallon plastic buckets. It helps keep the grain dry and away from rodents and also makes it easier to move around.
Before I put the grain in the buckets I mix in diatomaceous earth (DE) at a rate of about a cup to a bag of feed. What the DE does is keep the grain from getting infested by bugs (weevils). I have kept grain for over a year without having any problems with bugs. If you use DE be sure to get the food grade DE and not the one for the pool filters.
I use a trick that a friend, Robert Ragasa, shared with me to mix the grain. I have a small cement mixer and what I do is dump a bag of grain in there with a cup of DE and let it mix until all the grain is coated. Then I just dump it into the buckets. Be sure not to breathe in the DE dust, it is not good for your lungs. Either use a dust mask or mix the grain outdoors and stay upwind.
Identifying the birds while they are flying.
I like to use halloween hair spray to mark the white flighted/tailed birds. When spraying the wings on the birds, do not spray the whole flight feather. Keep the spray closer to the base of the feather. This will help when the birds fly in the rain, as the rain will soak into the sprayed feather and cause the birds to land faster than the unsprayed birds.
The colors that I like to use are flourescent pink, flourescent green and orange. These colors seem to be the easiest to see when the birds are flying.
With the self colored birds, notching the tail is a good way of marking the birds. You don't have to cut a lot of the feather to be seen. I usually cut off just to the top of the tailbar. By mixing the colored flights and tails, and tail cuts you can usually mark all of the birds in the kit differently.
Keeping the eggs moist.
When the birds are sitting on eggs, I like to spray the eggs with water every 2 or 3 days to help keep the inner membrane of the egg soft so it is easier for the squeaker to hatch. Most books will tell you to let the breeders bathe frequently while they are on eggs to help with this. I do let my fosters bathe at least once a week, but I also use the spray. I'm pretty sure that those who use those little individual breeding pens don't let their breeders bathe and I think this will help them the most.
I use a light disinfectant solution of Virkon S, about 1/4 teaspoon in a spray bottle. I use the Virkon S just in case there are any bad "bugs" in the nest and hopefully get the "bugs" before they infect the eggs. I don't know if the Virkon S helps or not but it doesn't seem to hurt the eggs.
Bossy birds in the breeding loft.
Occasionally when first getting the birds situated in the foster loft I will get a bird or two that will want to claim more than one nest box. What I would do was to hobble the birds by tying a small piece of string between the two bands on the birds legs. If they were not double banded, I would use a clip on band on one leg. This would make it hard for the bird to walk and handicap him/her if they wanted to fight. This worked great, but one day I had a bird that got the string tangled on a part of the nest box and I found him hanging upside down in the evening. He survived but, I don't hobble anymore.
What I do now is pull flight feathers off of the bossy bird. I will first start by pulling the first 4 primary flights on each wing. This will usually stop them since it is harder for them to fly, but ocassionally you will get a bird that will still want to conquer all of the nests and I will pull 2 more from each wing. I have not had a bird keep acting up after having 6 flights pulled from each wing. The feathers will grow in by the time the first set of squeakers are weaned and the bossy birds usually behave themselves for the rest of the season.
The tools that every flyer should have
A quality pair of sunglasses, a pair of binoculars, a stopwatch and a whole lot of patience.
Depth or Duration.
Determining the depth of a roll is a very subjective. What someone thinks is 20' is 10' to someone else. I feel that no one can accurately judge the distance of the roll every time. I consider myself pretty decent in judging distances since I was a fairly sucessful "spot and stalk" archery hunter, but even I know my limitations. There is no way to acurately and consistantly judge the depth of the roller.
I did an experiment once with 4 helium balloons and a fishing pole. I measured out 200' of fishing line and marked the 100' and 200' mark. I tied the four balloons to the line, (you need four to keep the line taut, 6 would have been better) and I also marked down every 10' from the balloons till the 50' mark. Then I let the balloons up to the 200' mark. It had to be a very calm day and where I live there is no power lines nearby so it was safe to do so. The line was let out about a 100 yards from where I usually stand to watch my kit. I did have a kit in the air and suprisingly after about 5 minutes they got used to the balloons and flew their usual pattern. I was able to compare the birds to the markings on the fishing line and what I learned that day was very eye opening.
Even after that experiment the way that I like to evaluate my birds is by duration. By using a stopwatch, (not counting to yourself one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two ect.) you can accurately and consistently grade each bird. Also when describing it to someone else there is no confusion, 1 second is 1 second no matter what. If you have never used a stopwatch on your birds you should try it. You might be pleasantly surprised or then again it might just wake you up from Lala land. When judging I usually don't use the stopwatch except to maybe time one or two birds to get a feel of what the average is of that specific kit. When flying at home I like to use it alot to accurately grade the birds.