The Dead Inverted Pyramid
Well, the next time you look at a pigeon try to imagine it is more than what you see with your eyes, hidden treasures lurk in the background of every bird.
With skill, those hidden genes are accessible and even past champions long since gone play an important part. My view is the birds have an inverted pyramid just resting on their heads. We might not see it but it is there and it's a rich vein of talent just waiting for us to tease it out into view. By breeding a lot of birds out of any bird we find out its strengths and its weaknesses and by charting our progress we see those parts.
A champion winning stud has depth which is why tapping into that stud is like reaching past the bird you may have bought and pulling out all the goodness, let's say out of a total of 20,000 ancestors there may be over 100 champions in its background.
Even one bird from such a stud will give you nearly all that you need, even if it is paired to an unrelated hen the offspring will have a percentage of the good stuff and inbred back in it will tighten the band of excellence by increasing the percentage of the sire. Explanation of the band of excellence is narrowing down the genetic material of what's needed when inbreeding, like peas in a pod breeding they all are the same.
Tight bands of inbreeding means you filter out the material you do not need and keep those good bits, inbreeding is the ultimate when mixed with parallel breeding partners. My mentor William Hughes used this method when he knew his breeding programme needed help, by just loaning out birds and keeping an eye open on the results. He found guys who only kept his strain so in reality his loft was huge but he only fed 20 pairs! Bill also kept his eye open when others crossed all sorts into his strain, if they showed something he liked he simply ran a separate line but narrowed the band back into his strain of champions. His stud of Exhibition Birmingham Rollers were the best as he kept the breed true to its size.
A man could not tell the difference from fly or show bird due to the small apple-bodied, correct-sized specimens he produced over the many years. As a challenge, who do you know that keeps your breed that you both could trust each other with linking your lofts as one strain, remember by pooling your birds together it means strength is building in depth by creating the foundation of a great stud. Distance has no part as my mentor lived in Wigan and I lived five hours away in Ipswich, the big secret is we both had the same truly wonderful bird in our heads.
Being true to a breed standard is hard so changes to fit what you are breeding is less than being true with yourself. One of the easiest things is putting on size so I call it the 'Xerox' effect, like any change it must be to better the breed, 'Xerox' the sizing does not. That great big inverted pyramid of generations is a key element of genetic material, failure in not knowing or seeing the bigger picture means you might just be widening the gap if you choose to keep re-introducing more genetic material.
