Six members attended the Jan. 14 meeting at the Beaumont Library. It became evident to everyone that our numbers wouldn’t support flying this year. Kip made a motion and the membership agreed that we would pay our IF dues out of the club treasury in order to keep the club going and to order our LKY bands. If LRPC members want to fly this year, we would need to become members of the Bluegrass Racing Pigeon Club (Frankfort). Their racing schedule (tentatively) is scheduled to start on April 17. I will post their race schedule here when it is confirmed.

Frankfort club dues are $200 per season. Additionally, AU dues are $25. Frankfort club gathers to ship birds on Friday nights and opens clocks again on Sunday nights at Simon Parker’s house.

The Lexington RPC has also decided to try to host a One-Loft Race. John James is finishing off a new loft at his farm and will house the birds. Details are still being worked out and will be announced here later. The initial proposal was to charge $10/bird for LRPC members and $15 for non-members. The birds would have a three-race schedule.

Below is a map of the race stations used by Frankfort/Louisville. Most of them are the same as the LRPC with the exception being the shortest race (Franklin?).

View Bluegrass Racing Pigeon Club Race Stations in a larger map

Tory releases Speckles at Camp Nelson - one of their nine tosses from the 17-mile point.

Tory Stephenson, daughter of David and Angie, won the overall medallion in her school’s fourth grade science fair with her project titled “Flight Time.” For her project, Tory wanted to determine if weather conditions played a factor in the amount of time it took one of her birds to get home from a 17-mile release. On to Districts!

From her project:

From the results of my experiment, I learned that it appears temperatures between 24 degrees and 68 degrees do not have an effect on the birds. There wasn’t much precipitation during our experiment so we can’t tell if it affects the birds. Our data suggests that when the wind is coming from the south (tail winds) the birds would come home faster than when the wind is coming from the north (head wind). The air pressure between 29.85 and 30.26 didn’t seem to effect the pigeons. Extreme weather conditions quite possibly would effect the pigeons but we didn’t experience any extreme conditions. The birds flew a route home from the same release point every time. They may have learned the route home to become faster.