Monica? Bill? Impeachment? Glendening? Sauerbrey?

No, no, no, no and no. None of the above.

The big buzz at the Hamilton Homing Pigeon Club is the Disastrous Year of the Lost Pigeons.

"You're going to have a big earthquake," predicts John Butler, a veteran pigeon flyer from Bowley's Quarters. "The magnetic field's changing. You watch. The pigeons go according to magnetic field."

The Hamilton racing pigeon flyers have lost plenty of pigeons this year. But they're not alone. The whole country began hearing about roaming homing pigeons a few weeks back, when Philadelphia area clubs suffered the sensational and mysterious loss of some 1,600 of 2,200 racing pigeons launched in Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

Butler's big rumble theory is no more far-fetched than most of the theories as to why the pigeons' usually precise homing systems are going awry. Butler, a retired printer who's been racing pigeons since he was a boy, thinks the birds may be telling us something, their erratic behavior a kind of early warning system.

"Somewhere down in the core of this Earth you're going to have a tremendous earthquake," he says. "Or whatever they're doing up there - salting the atmosphere with spaceships, or something like that - is changing all those magnetic fields. This has been a disastrous year. I mean losing pigeons, good pigeons."

He points to fellow racer Bruce Vain. "There's one of the top flyers around. Bruce, he'll tell how bad a disastrous year it's been."

"I lost about 60 of them this year," says Vain, 49, a stocky guy whose bird won Hamilton's most recent 300-mile race.

Sleek racing pigeons should not be confused with the scruffy "rats with wings" that beg for food in the street. These are elegant, intelligent, highly trained and conditioned, and sometimes quite expensive birds. Not long ago a Taiwanese syndicate paid $1 million for a single male bird, according to Tom Erskine, a Hamilton club flyer who is chief copy editor for the nationally prestigious Racing Pigeon Digest. The million-dollar pigeon won't be racing anymore, but he'll get a $5,000 stud fee each time he mates.

Erskine, 54, a retired Air Force translator, says that street birds and homing pigeon racers are as different as Wild West mustangs and thoroughbred racehorses. Some of his birds have pedigrees stretching back to 1908.

Racing birds average 45 miles an hour on a good day without a head wind. And for centuries, they've been remarkably consistent in returning home over amazing distances. The Sultan of Baghdad established a pigeon post in 1150 A.D., according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But for the past two decades, racers say, homing pigeons have become increasingly erratic.

"The losses are worse every year," says Nick Trapani, 70, club president. "The last 10 years it's been getting progressively worse."

The losses grate on pigeon flyers, who are fiercely competitive in a sport that's curiously passive and mostly anticipation. Racers actually see their birds in flight only when they're nearly home at the end of a race. Then there's a flurry of activity to get the pigeon as quickly as possible into the loft.

In the club's recent 300-mile race, 874 pigeons were taken in a specially constructed truck to Lexington, N.C., where they were all released simultaneously. Every racer is banded and numbered. As each returns to its loft, its numbered band is dropped into a sealed clock and the time recorded. The fastest bird home - determined by dividing the time into the surveyed distance to the loft - wins.

Routinely, only a few seconds decide the winners in races of 300 miles, which last about seven hours. Pigeons are flocking birds that fly together and don't split up to head for their own lofts until close to home.

"The weak ones fall back and the strong ones keep coming," says James Esbrandt, 72, club secretary.

Esbrandt recalls that "years ago, if you sent 20 birds down on a race and you got 17 or 18 of them home on a Sunday, you could almost bet the next morning when you got up the others would be sitting on the landing board waiting."

Earlier this season, one of Butler's birds entered in a 150-mile race ended up in North Carolina instead of Baltimore. That's a real wrong-way pigeon. People all over the country have reported finding birds that detoured in the Philadelphia debacle.

It's not happening just during races. "The training this year is the worst it's ever been," Butler says. "And I been training them 35 years."

His grandfather, Lou Gill, who ran an A-rabber horse stable on Durham Street, started him out with pigeons years ago. Baltimore has always been a big pigeon town; East Baltimore once had a "tremendous" number of lofts, says Trapani. Pigeoneering was relatively cheap then; now, keeping a loft of 80 to 100 birds probably costs $2,500 a year.

Founded in 1934, the Hamilton club, which roosts atop a reclaimed cliff with a pigeon's-eye view of the city spreading away to the southwest, had 375 members in in those days. Now there are 62 members, 45 or so who actually race pigeons. At a recent monthly meeting, there's a theory for every member about what's happening to homing pigeons.

During the 300-mile race from North Carolina, Esbrandt lost 12 of the 17 birds he entered. John Cavallio, 71, a Kingsville flyer, has seen only seven of his 32 birds return. Ed Plevyak, 71, sent 20 and got 12 back. Trapani sent 24; only half came home to his Perry Hall loft.

"It's not just our club," Trapani says. "It's all over the world."

Britain's Royal Pigeon Racing Society lost 80,000 of 90,000 pigeons in a torrential rainfall over the English Channel last year.

"When Pennsylvania lost their pigeons," Vain points out, "California had a smash the same day: 3,000 pigeons lost."

"And nobody knows why," Esbrandt says.

Of course, nobody quite knows why or how homing pigeons navigate home in the first place. Scientists suggest they orient themselves according to the sun and the horizon, the temperature and wind, even atmospheric pressure and gravitational forces.

(Incidentally, pigeons don't fly at night. "They can't see," Harry Bart, 55, explains. This makes them vulnerable to predators such as cats and owls when they set down for the night in a strange place. Some pigeoneers suggest migrating hawks took down the Philadelphia birds.)

Scientists have mostly discounted the Earth's magnetic field and rotation as influences on homing pigeons. But at the Hamilton club and elsewhere in the pigeon racing world, radio-magnetic interference is a leading suspect in the loss of birds. Their increasingly erratic flight patterns parallel the rise in use of cell phones and microwave devices over the last couple of decades.

"I think all the satellites we have and the telephones ... I think it's ruining the instincts of the birds," says Plevyak. "I think it's interfering with their ability to get home."

Erskine, the pigeon racing journalist, says even though nobody is sure how the birds find their way home, there's lots of skill, strategy and even subterfuge involved in getting them home fast.

Pigeons, for instance, are strongly monogamous. Some flyers restrict the sex lives of their male birds, then put the partner in the nest to encourage them to hurry home. This seems to work with cocks, but not so well with hens, which also race.

Hens respond better to motherhood, some pigeon flyers believe. They've been known to empty an egg, then seal a fly inside and put the egg back in the nest. The racing hen, thinking she's left a hatching chick at home, theoretically heads for the roost at breakneck speed.

It's unclear if there's a lesson for ordinary mortals in all this, except perhaps to stay out of the rain and turn off your microwave. And if you find a lost pigeon, offer it a drink. They dehydrate while flying and they're more thirsty than hungry.

Pub date 10/18/98