Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Cliffside ·
The Rings Return First
A fancier's loft book records three homecomings ringed with years the calendar has not reached, and the club minutes cannot disown a single entry.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Sidney Luckhurst, pigeon fancier"
I keep the loft book at the Cliffside allotments and enter every ring that comes home to my birds, and one blue hen of mine has now returned three times wearing rings stamped with years that have not happened yet, and the club minute book has it on record that the rings are genuine.
A ring is a small matter of law. Every young bird goes up wearing the year's issue, seamless aluminium, stamped with the year and a running number, and next year's rings sit sealed in a tin in the clubroom until the committee counts them out in January. Every race night the rings are checked against the book at the gate, two men to a bird, and the book is balanced before anyone has tea. A fancier does not cut a ring off his own bird. The bird's papers say so, and I wrote half the papers myself.
The hen, which I bred in 1979, went away from a training toss in August 1986 wearing 86 MU 4107, logged in the ordinary way. She came back at dusk on the 4th of October of that same year wearing 87 MU 2211: right stamp, right make, right weight, all club issue, and the stamp said 87 in a year that was not 1987 yet. I logged it and kept my voice down about it, because a man who brings that word home is a man who gets his loft watched. On the 12th of January 1987 she returned from exercise wearing 88 MU 0930. Three weeks ago she dropped in at dusk wearing 89 MU 5144. The old rings are never on her and never found. The leg underneath is clean.
The club has handled it all itself. The secretary, Cyril Felgate, came up to the loft with the allocation sheets and matched 88 MU 0930 against them, and two members, Ron Kettle and Tom Gorse, signed my book beneath the entry, which is the form. In the spring the committee broke the seal on the 1988 tin to make the year's allocation, and the count was one ring short, and the number short was 88 MU 0930. The seal wax was unbroken when they opened it. The count stands in the minutes, countersigned, and the shortfall is minuted too, entered as a stock discrepancy the way the forms wanted it.
The bird herself is no marvel to handle. She trains ordinary, sits tight, feeds her squeakers on time, and on a show bench you would mark her high until your eye found the leg. I have clipped nothing off her; a ringed bird is a recorded bird, and the book records what comes home. Felgate had photographs taken of the 89 ring at the clubroom table, laid alongside a dated newspaper, and the prints are filed with the minutes the same as any show result.
So it is corroborated in the way pigeon men corroborate: three signatures, a set of allocation sheets, a counted tin, photographs with a newspaper. What the papers do not settle is the arithmetic I do at night in the loft with the lamp on. The stamps run exactly one year ahead of my book, issue day by issue day, as patient as a tradesman's round. If she keeps that course, then some January I will log a ring for a year I shall not live to see, and the loft book will go on being balanced and signed right up to the entry in question. What no minute in the club's book decides, and what I shall be asking at the annual general, is which year will be the last one she comes home to.