With a flurry of wings and feathers, the pigeons shot out of their second-story coop.
About 30 birds flew in sweeping circles around a Rockville home.
(Brian Lewis/The Gazette) - Amor Malong turned the upstairs dormers in his garage into coops for about 80 pigeons. He began raising the birds as a teenager growing up in the Philippines.
“They’re my athletes,” said Amor Malong, who raises, trains and races homing pigeons at his house. “They race from one point going home. Who is going to fly home first?”
Malong has raised homing pigeons in a light-filled coop in his garage on the corner of Crabb Avenue and Burgundy Drive since 2008. He started racing the birds last year, entering a sport that was introduced to the United States in the 19th century.
Homing pigeons can find their way home from more than 300 miles away and at speeds of 60 miles per hour, said Mindy Rosewitz, curator at the U.S. Army Communications Electronics Museum in Fort Monmouth, N.J., which closed to the public May 30. Magnetic fluid behind their ears and noses guides the birds based on the magnetic poles. Sometimes storms will throw them off track, or radio waves in cable towers confuse their sense of direction. But generally, the pigeons find their way home.
Malong is a member of the American Racing Pigeon Union, a group founded in 1910 that boasts nearly 10,000 members. Of those, between 100 and 150 live in the Washington area, said Karen Clifton, executive director of the organization.
“It appeals to people from every walk of life,” Clifton said. “We have janitors, we have judges. We have teachers, we have bus drivers. We have mechanics, we have surgeons.”
Malong, who emigrated from the Philippines in 1987, raised pigeons back in the island nation.
“I figured I wanted to start again,” Malong said. “I’m hooked. I love them.”
As a teenager in the Philippines, Malong said he purchased colorful parakeets for his mother. The birds reproduced, until the squawking grew too loud for his mother to bear. While Malong was off at school, his mother released the birds, expecting them to return home after a few hours of peace and quiet. But they didn’t.
“Maybe I should get something that will come back home,” Malong said to his mother.
And so he purchased pigeons.
“I saw the birds, the pigeons, as a symbol of love,” he said. “Watching them fly and knowing they’re coming back to you. It gives me a little happiness that they come back. They love me. They love the house.”
One of his winged athletes finished 27th place out of 287 birds, he said, in a contest in the United States — the best that one of his birds has done.
Training pigeons takes time; they first need to learn where their food comes from. Released around the house first, the pigeons will come home to roost, Malong said. Then, after about three weeks, he takes them a few miles away, to Montgomery College’s Rockville campus, and watches them find their way home. Now, he takes some birds as far as West Virginia and sends them home — a distance of about 70 miles.
“When they beat me home, when I get here and they’re already here, I say, ‘OK, time for you to go farther,’” Malong said.
The coop above Malong’s garage is clean. Pigeons coo, nest and bob about their quarters.
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