Marinduque Island

A week felt like a month here. Marinduque, is, an island. That’s it and that’s all. Small, sleepy and quiet, an island you can drive around within a few hours. Power outages are a fact of life. Days are hot, nights are lonely. You only hear crickets and wind and splashing waves. But around end of March and early April, the whole island erupts in a week-long festival called Moriones, a religious tradition that has become one frenzied Mardi Gras. Time was when Lenten season is the country’s quietest of the year. But yes, times, they are a-changin!

Kwentong Barbero (Homing Pigeons)

At Manila JAC Liner terminal, I was seated in an 11am bus bound for Lucena to be in time for the 4pm Ro-Ro boat trip to Cawit port in Marinduque when my boss called and advised me to take the later trip. So I got off that coveted front seat and waited for the 12:15 bus arriving at 4:30pm, 30 minutes after the boat left. Deym! I was fidgeting a little bit regretting I changed buses and that I had to wait for the next boat trip, 5 hours hence! So I walked back to that barbershop I saw earlier and had a haircut, while listening to uniquely entertaining stories you can only hear in these places. And the topic? Homing pigeons….

The other guy seated next to me was a fisherman. He narrated that two days ago in the middle of the ocean, a pigeon force-landed and took a ride on his boat. He said the bird was starved and exhausted from flying. His barber said matter-of-factly that it was on a race and that, the bird was on its way back to where it came from. Pigeon races are common in the area, he continued. This was where I joined in the conversation, What’s a pigeon race?, I asked quizzically.

I was told that priced pigeons are bred and raised particularly for these races. Pigeons instinctively fly back to its loft (nest) when taken and let loose at another location. At first they are taken away at short distances and gradually taken further from the loft as the training progresses. The best ones are those that fly back fastest. That’s how they are trained and that’s why they are called homing pigeons. And what’s the race about? It’s price money to the owner of the fastest bird! Kids start betting at 20 pesos to a few hundreds, while adults place bets by the thousands!

I was fascinated by the story so I made a little research about pigeons. One story suggests that the bird has a built-in map in its brain. Its home loft is ingrained like a blip on a radar screen. And like a compass that points North all the time, the bird knows where its at anywhere relative to its home loft, so it flies in the direction of that blip only the bird can see. Amazing! But here’s more:

Pigeon poop was a highly prized fertilizer in the 16th, 17th and 18th century Europe. So prized in fact that armed guards were stationed at the entrances to dovecotes (pigeon houses) to stop thieves from stealing it! In the World Wars, the pigeon saved hundreds of thousands of human lives by carrying messages across enemy lines. Pigeons were carried on ships in convoys and in the event of a U-boat attack a messenger pigeon was released with details of the location of the sinking ship. In the same way, pilots carry pigeons and release the bird in case they had to ditch their planes. Pigeons are still used today by the French, Swiss, Israeli, Iraqi and Chinese Armies.

Even in sports and business and news, pigeons proved invaluable. In Roman times the pigeon was used to carry results of sporting events such as the Olympic Games and this is why white pigeons are released at the start of the Olympic Games today. Reuters, started its European business by using trained homing pigeons carrying the latest news and stock prices from Aachen in Germany to Brussels in Belgium. The birds traveled the 76 miles in a record-breaking two hours beating the railway by four hours!

Queen Elizabeth II, Elvis Presley, Mike Tyson, Gucci and Paul Newman are some famous people who keep homing pigeons to race. And this maybe incredulous but true: One racing pigeon recently sold for a staggering $132,517.00! The 3-year old bird was a champion racer beating 21,000 other pigeons in one long distance race!

Ahh, barbers, haircuts, Homing Pigeons. I like these barbershop conversations….