1st Ace Bird Sprint Champion 2021 of the United Kingdom!
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So the story continues
I paid a visit to Curtis Wall and Lunt (The Boys) to get an insight to how their season went.
As many of you know the partnership of Curtis Wall and Lunt spilt in 2018 with Alan and Gary staying together at the bottom loft.
This resulted in them deciding in 2019 they would have a year of racing. In 2020 Alan and Gary started racing young birds in the Acton Bridge club, competing in the mid cheshire federation. So Ray moved up to the top loft and joined the Lymm FC to race young birds in 2019. Ray flew his young birds in the Lymm FC which is in the Lymm federation, Rays loft was situated approximately 300 yards North of Alan and Garys loft and decided to apply to join Lymm FC in 2019, but they was refused. They applied again in 2020 and again the same result their application was refused.
In 2023 the Lymm FC joined Mid Cheshire Fed, this resulted in Alan and Gary racing against Ray every week. This change saw the birds coming together every week, so it was pointless racing against each other.
In the winter of 2023 the decision was made to reform the Curtis, Wall and Lunt partnership which they did and 2024 was business as usual. They are now in the process of trying to create a super family for the future.
So how did they go on, well the 2024 season has been a great one for the Curtis, Wall and Lunt Loft.
So lets look at it in stages. The plan at the beginning of the year was to put the best performing pigeons in the stock loft, which left them to a race team of 32 cocks which were all yearlings apart from 2 older birds and the hens were all various ages.
The birds were put together from the two different lofts and all went well until they started to break the birds from Rays double decker lofts. The lofts were only 300 yards apart, but as we all know there is always the end one that does not want to play ball.
But they got there in the end.
The birds were paired on the 21st of January for racing, and they took a pair of youngsters of each pair, which they either sold or were given to friends. Its always good to breed off all the pigeons because you never know where the unexpected champion racer will come from.
Through experience we all know that we are never going to find winners in every nest. However,through giving them to friends all lofts have a chance to find that champion that we are all looking for.
Lets move back to the story when they paired the stock birds on the 18th of February, these youngsters were retained for their own race team. The system was set up to see if the plan of putting their best racers to stock would prove successful, you do need a couple of years to find the best in them.
This team of youngsters were later than usual and it did make a slight difference to the moult but of no detriment to the way the birds performed. With every trial there can be benefits and in this case the one thing they did find with having later youngsters that they have no trouble from hawks.
The birds were entered in only 5 fed races out of 7 due to young bird sickness and fat eye but they still took 4 first feds out of the 5 races entered so the plan worked. This year has seen their best young bird season for quite a few years and if they had not caught young bird sickness and fat eye who know what they could have done.
We have moved on bit so let’s go back to the old birds and as I wrote earlier after the task of breaking the birds to the new loft that they would be racing from the birds were now sitting eggs. As we all know with racing pigeons each day is a different story as one day the cocks went out and the next day the hens.
As we would expect, each time the birds were exercised the odd one went back to the old loft but the cocks were better than the hens and by the time racing came around the birds had settled well except a few that were not impressed by the move.
The team were not expecting too much from the first race, but to their surprise they had great resulttaking the first 4 in the fed.
From then on with the old birds they didn’t look back, taking 7 first feds out of 12 races entered and through the whole season young and old they took the first 4 in the fed on 7 occasions. Plus 4 other times they had 4 in the first 10 of the fed.
So all in all they won 11 first feds out of 17 racing entered and 52 fed positions in the first 6 out of a possible 102. Which is a great achievement in anyone’s book.
Can they do any better? Can they have a perfect season?
That is something we will have to wait and see.
Looking forward to 2025.
G.W. Greenwood