You count them out and you count them in. That is the sport. Six years running I have counted more in than out, and the extra one has no ring on its leg.
My grandad kept pigeons and my dad kept pigeons and I keep pigeons, and I am the last one, because my two think it is mad.
If you do not know the sport, the whole of it is counting.
Every bird has a ring. It goes on at about six days old, before the leg is big enough to get it off again, and it is a closed ring with a year and a number on it, and that number is registered to me with the union. The bird cannot be un-rung. You would have to cut the leg.
On a race day the birds go in baskets to the club, get marked, go on a transporter, and get liberated hundreds of miles away at a stated time. Then they fly home, and the clock in my garden reads the ring as the bird comes through the trap.
So the sport is: eighteen out, eighteen in, and the paperwork says which is which.
Losing birds is normal. A hawk, weather, wires, a young one that goes the wrong way and joins somebody else's kit. You expect to lose some and you know precisely which ones, by number.
Gaining one is not normal.
A stray does happen, and I want to deal with that first because it is what everybody says.
A tired bird comes down on somebody else's loft. It happens constantly, especially with young birds in bad weather. The etiquette is you take the ring number, you ring the union, they tell you whose it is, and either the owner collects it or you post it back in a box.
I have taken in nine strays in thirty years. Every one had a ring and every one went home.
The bird I am talking about has no ring.
Not a cut ring, not a slipped ring, not a foreign ring I cannot read. A clean leg, both legs, the way a bird is for the first six days of its life and never again after.
The first time was the August of the year my dad died, which is why I remember it exactly and why I did not make much of it.
I sent fourteen to a race and I trapped fifteen. I stood there with the clock and the sheet and I counted them three times in the loft and there were fifteen bodies and fourteen numbers.
I put it down to a stray and I looked for the ring and there was not one, and I thought, somebody's had it off for some reason, and I put it in the spare section and I meant to sort it out and my dad had died in the June and I did not sort anything out that year.
It was gone by the October. Not dead in the loft. Gone.
It came back the next August.
I say it came back and I need to be careful, because one grey pigeon looks a great deal like another grey pigeon and any fancier who tells you otherwise is showing off.
But I know my own birds by eye, all forty of them, the way a person knows faces. And this one is not one of mine and never has been and it is the same one, and I will tell you the two things that make me certain.
There is a white feather in the right wing, third primary, which is nothing on its own.
And it stands wrong. Every pigeon in that loft stands facing the trap, because the trap is where the food comes from and where the light is. That bird stands facing the door. Every time. In a loft of forty birds all pointing one way there is one pointing at me.
Six years. Every August.
I have kept a note now, which I did not for the first two. Here it is, and it is the most boring supernatural evidence anybody has ever presented.
2019: sent 14, trapped 15. 2020: no racing, so nothing. It did not come. 2021: sent 20, trapped 21. 2022: sent 18, trapped 19. 2023: sent 18, trapped 19. 2024: sent 16, trapped 17. 2025: sent 15, trapped 16.
The 2020 line is the one I keep going back to. There was no season. I did not send a basket anywhere. And nothing turned up in the loft that year, which means whatever it is, it comes home with the others or it does not come at all.
It is always gone by the middle of October, and I have never once seen it leave.
I have done the sensible things.
I put a camera in the loft in 2022, one of those cheap ones for a shed. I got four hundred clips of pigeons and the bird is in a lot of them and it does nothing except stand facing the door. It is on the footage. It is not something only I can see, and I would like that on the record.
I asked the club. Not straight out. I asked it sideways, the way things get asked in a clubhouse, whether anybody had ever trapped one more than they sent.
The room went a bit quiet and a man I have known for twenty five years said, not me. And then a fortnight later he rang me up about something else entirely and at the end of it he said, that thing you asked, and then he said he would rather not, and we have not spoken about it again.
I have never handled it.
That is the honest core of this. I have had a thousand birds in my hands. I have held birds while a vet did things to them. And I have never once picked that one up, in six years, and I could not tell you what stops me.
I have got close. In 2023 I had my hands either side of it, ready to lift, and it did not move and it did not look at me and I did not close my hands.
My dad handled every bird in that loft every day of his life.
Last August I did one thing differently, and it is why I am telling somebody.
I put a ring on the perch.
Not on the bird. A closed ring from this year's batch, a spare, sitting on the perch where it stands. I do not know what I thought would happen. I think I wanted to offer it something.
It was there for three days and then it was not.
The bird was gone by the eighth of October, same as always, and I went through the loft after, as you do at the end of a season, cleaning the perches and checking the boxes.
The ring was in the nest box under the perch. Closed, undamaged, the way it comes out of the packet.
I have got it in a tin on the shelf in the loft. I put it out again this year and it went the same way.
The number on it is registered to me. It is in the union's book with my name against it, and it is on a ring that has never been on a bird, and every August I put it out and every October it comes back to the box.
I have started to think about who it is for.