Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing

Carolyn Wells
Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:30:34 +0000
Editor's Pick, animal rights, gambling, longreads, Oliver Egger, pigeons, The Paris Review

"They flap their wings as fast as they can until they disappear over the horizon—all heading toward Chicago, all heading home."

Step inside the world of the American Racing Pigeon Union (ARPU) convention, where Oliver Egger introduces us to the sport’s colorful characters and its often unspoken ethical debates. The racing pigeons themselves are astonishingly brave, risking storms, predators, hunger, and exhaustion as they navigate hundreds of miles to find their way home. But the most impressive birds are the ones treated as commodities—valued, traded, and sold for their performance.

The room overloaded the senses: the earthy stench of animal mingled with the artificial tang of jumbo bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and freshly cracked Coca-Cola cans, into which Jack Daniel’s was poured from a passed-around handle. Conversations, overlapping in Polish, Spanish, and English, were punctuated by the frequent, piercing beeps of the racing bands fastened around the birds’ legs being scanned at a table up front.

Just as the sun begins to peek over the flat horizon of Coon Rapids, Iowa, 1,383 pigeons fill the sky. The birds pour out as a single winged mass from the rows of flung-open coops on the transport truck. They rise and circle higher into the morning air. Strong gusts from the south-southwest soon scatter them into hundreds of solitary black dots across the slabs of clouds.