Irish Sea-Racing Pigeons

This was the easiest way to categorise what was essentially, a large collection of performance and pedigreed pigeons, whose make-up, conditioning, and disposition is based around flying from racepoints in the UK or France across 1 or 2 notoriously dangerous seas to their home lofts in Ireland.

It is sometimes easier to classify pigeons as being from a particular strain or family of birds – but sometimes those birds deserve a little spotlight all of their own, such is the distinction to which they have performed, not just for their original owners, but for many of the other fanciers, whose hands they have passed through.

These families below represent such collections of pigeons. We don’t have many of any of them – as would befit their base and source, but what we do have is a very special selection of core genetics from “very close to the tree” of those families – painstakingly assembled over the past 5 – 10 years.

The “Dolly” Family

The “Dolly Family”, based around a 4 times France Hen Gold medal winner and certificate of merit award winner for her exploits in being in the prizes from 4 French races over 3 years. Additionally, she won the Harkness Rosebowl Award with her Grandson – and their children and Grand Children have continued to contribute to distance racing either pure or crossed. We have had a number of sons and daughters of Dolly here from this “once in a lifetime” family of pigeons.

The “Brooks” Family

Whenever we encounter a family of pigeons which have been raced on both the North Road and the South Road – we’re interested ! This family is one such family, with multiple prize winning performances from the North of Scotland complimented by further performances from the North West of France.

These birds are based upon the Bob Harkness pigeons and are beautiful handlers, possess great eyesign and possess a super homing ability. The last race performance of the hens we have at stock for the fancier we attained them from was a race from Talbenny in South Wales, being nervous about whether they would all come back so that we could purchase them, the vendor quipped “they never fail” – and so they didn’t, 12 from 12 duly arrived on the day of the race, looking like they hadn’t been anywhere.

The “Cordner” Family

Based on the super Hen “Home Alone”, the only bird on the day and winner of 1^st Open NIPA St. Malo Derby in 2014. She was also 10^th Section and 15^th Open in the 2016 St. Malo Derby as well as 52^nd Sec, and 84^th Open Penzance in the same year. Based on a Busschaert / Theelan background, this colony of birds has produced very tough pigeons which has also won the Yearling National with the only bird on the day. Other performances included 5^th Open Kings Cup and many more minor prizes during a short but highly successful period of racing.