One reader races pigeons. He originally asked about Geomagnetic storm alerts, https://ykalaska.wordpress.com/2006/09/20/geomagnetic-storm-alerts/
and discussed here- Pigeons, geomagnetic storms, and auroras
And then tried out the real-time maps of storms and whether that would improve his birds performance–
Hi Pam, Since I started using the information that you gave to me, my racing performance has gone up drastically. My losses are down and my winning is up. I send very few birds when the warnings are high, which result in fewer losses and when it is low I send a few more of the higher pedigree birds and the winnings are up. Thank you very much for your input. I will start racing again in August of this year and will keep you informed as to the results. I will definitely be using this information on my birds during their training this summer also, as I take them out as far as 100 miles on training tosses. thanks again.
Avian Navigation (pdf file)
Roswitha Wiltschko and Wolfgang Wiltschko
The Auk 126(4):717–743, 2009.
American Ornithologists’ Union, 2009. Special Reviews in Ornithology
http://www.aou.org/auk/reviews/review_126_4.pdf
- What’s So Special About Pigeons from AAAS. (Links to Project PigeonWatch are broken.)
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Pigeon racing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_racing - From Cornell University, Project PigeonWatch
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pigeonwatch -
American Racing Pigeon Union
http://www.pigeon.org/
Site Search Tags: auroras, birds, pigeons, sunspots, geomagnetic+storms, migration
Grassroots Science 
Wow! This is an amazing article! I’m a pigeon racer and I’ve got a MSci in Physics and Astrophysics so this is an amazing study, thanks!
I’ve just started a pigeon racing website here: pigeon lofts and wondered if I could repost this on there?
I’ll give you full credit and link back to this site, of course!
I can’t believe that my astrophysics degree has actually become relevant to pigeon racing, this is astonishing… honestly, this post is brilliant, thank you!
– Will
Sorry– you were caught in the spam trap. You can certainly post excerpts or your own summary then post a link back to this original post. I’d rather the entire post were not re-posted. There are a couple of other posts, linked internally, too.
These birds are pretty amazing.
Pam
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It’s nice to find a good information source about pigeon racing. It’s fascinating to see some deep scientific principles applied to the activity, especially given the measured improvements where the data was taken into account.
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