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Bird-brained Japanese racing pigeon takes a wrong turn during 600 mile race...

and ends up 5,000 miles away in CANADA

By JOSHUA GARDNER

    A bird released in its first Japanese pigeon race chose to forgo the 600-mile competition in favor of a much larger goal: a 5,000 mile trek across the Pacific.

A one-year-old racing pigeon in the northerly Japanese province of Hokkaido was released along with 8,000 other birds on May 10. Last week, it was found an ocean away on Canada’s Vancouver Island.

   Rescuers were even able to contact the exhausted and starving bird’s owner near Sapporo.

         

 

   So how did a little bird make such a big trip?

 ‘When they’re flying around they become dehydrated and weakened,’ Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society founder Maj Birch told ABC News. ‘He may have landed on ships where there was no food, maybe rode on the ship until he felt like he could fly some more.’

 

 

 

Just because he may have had some help, however,

doesn’t make the bird’s trip any less astounding. 

             

   Vast ocean: The bird left Japan on May 10 and was found across the Pacific on a Vancouver Island air force base last week instead of its planned destination of just 600 miles from where it took off

 

   Of the thousands of birds that began the race last month, only twenty percent were able to finish.

  Not surprisingly, it was the long range pigeon’s own mother that won the Japanese race.

    What’s more, most pigeons have a range of closer to 400 miles.

Rescuers were able to make contact with the pigeon’s owner thanks to tags on the animal's legs. 

           

Special bird: The pigeon began the race with 8,000 other birds,

only twenty percent of which even completed it

 

 

  ‘This is a superior pigeon,’ Hiroyasu Takasu told ABC. Takasu, who owns about 100 birds where he lives in Ibaraki Prefecture, was shocked the bird was still alive.

‘I was so relieved he was found alive,’ he said. ‘Birds usually reach their limit in a week, with no food or water.’

   Despite being impressed with his charge’s feat, Takasu asked that the bird not be returned, fearing further travel would endanger its health.

             

   Lucky: Rescuers found its owner via this leg tag. But Japanese trainer Hiroyasu Takasu declined to fly him home. Now the bird's been adopted by Canadian pigeon racers who hope to breed the stout bird

 

   ‘We did not even have a name for this one, because we only give names to birds that return home,’ he said.

   So, now, the nameless bird that crossed an ocean has been adopted by the Mid-Island Racing Club in nearby Nanaimo, Canada.

Trainers there plan to shack up the tough young bird with a suitable female in the hopes of breeding the next generation of champion racing pigeons.

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