March/April 2025

17 – Purebred PIGEON Manuel Morán Pascual, I was able to occupy some of his dovecotes and breeding cages on the roof of a building in a traditional neighborhood of Madrid with some pairs of pigeons for my experiment to recreate those feathered avian dinosaurs that are our beloved pigeons. Thus began the “Jurassic roof” project. I was fortunate in getting probably the last two fairly pure males of Spanish frilled Bagadette, kindly given by my friend Rafael Fernández de Zafra and descendants of the specimens of the mythical farm “Los Tilos” which in turn came from Barcelona, the place of origin and devel- opment of that breed. My idea was to recreate the Spanish Bagdad breed and save the Spanish frilled Bagadette breed with those two specimens. So I acquired a pair of French Bagdads – not too faithful to the standard of their breed – as they did not have the characteristic modern hypertype. I considered this positive, because the French Bagdad in- volved in the creation of the Spanish Bagadette were surely not like the modern ones, but more rustic and crude in one aspect. Levi, by personal communication from Brage, indicates that Bechstein in 1795 establishes the origin of the breed by crosses between a type of French Bagdad and the Turkish pigeon. In the project, the use of the Spanish Frilled Bagdette was justified by its ancestry: Spanish Bagdad, Turkish pigeon and Belgian homers with neck frill, always accord- ing to Brage. Spanish Bagdad, Spanish Frilled Bagdette and Turkish pigeons disappeared in the second half of the twen- tieth century and they were always minority breeds related to the region of Catalonia and either created or maintained by a few breeders considered eccentric by the breeders of other more common breeds. I set out to make the pairs, and as I only had two almost pure Spanish frilled Bagdette, I paired the one that seemed to me to be the best of the two, compared to the image on page 83 of Levi’s Encyclopedia, with the female French Bagdad of strange grizzle blue color, supposedly homozygous, although with a pair of tail feathers unaffected by the grizzle factor and others completely white, which made me to think that it was also pied or tigered. The male of French Bagdad, a black bird with some white spots, was paired with a female of Homer silver blue with frill neck, and the first F1 were born in small numbers as the French Bagdad were not particularly good fosters. The results were as follows: A. French Bagdad black white spots x Homer frill neck silver blue: 1 male heterozygous black pied and 1 female heterozy- gous black with a white feather in wing. B. Spanish Frilled Bagdette recessive yellow with white spots x French Bagdad blue checker grizzle heterozygous: 1 female Khaki T-Checker and 1 female yellow grizzle.