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Helmet – Page 22 – Purebred PIGEON
Breed of the Issue - Helmet
Thoughts onHelmet Breeding
By Mike Crawford and Bob Bollinger
T
he conventional wisdom for pigeon breeding
is: “mate the best to the best”! This is a great
rule if you have a loft full of champions and
proven breeders. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have
a loft full of perfect birds. We will try to share our
more practical experience with breeding Helmets.
The basic ideas that we want to share in this
article are:
1. You should only breed with your better birds
2. Sometimes your best breeders are not the show
winners
3. Balancing features is the key
4. Some faults should never be bred from
Ideally, we would always breed the best to the
best birds. However, “Best” is not always defined by
show results. Moreover, experience has shown that
some of our most productive pairs have been two
stock birds. You must take all the features of the bird
into account when planning your matings. Some of
the birds that aren’t good in the show pen can be very
useful in the breeding pen. Typically, people refer
to those less than perfect birds as stock birds. Stock
birds are maintained because they have one or two
great features that we want to use to enhance another
bird. This is where balance comes in. As we mate our
pairs we try to ensure that each bird has features that
improve the other or compensates for a defect. Listed
below are a number of features we have found can be
balanced in matings: (in no particular order)
• Color
• Weak Rosettes to Deep Drilled Rosettes
• Long to Short (birds and feather length in general)
• Tall to Short
• Cap / Markings (over marked to under marked,
mis-marked to very cleanly marked)
• Beak length (short to long, stout to weak)
• Beak setting (beak setting can be improved, but if
a bird is very down set, don’t breed it)
• Feather quality (long and loose to tight and hard)
As much as balance is good, you always need
to remember to breed with only your better birds.
Mediocre birds typically breed mediocre birds and bad
birds rarely make anything useful. We try to sort out
a group of our better birds (show and stock birds) and
use them for breeding. We typically try to keep similar
birds together and only improve one or two features at
a time. Putting very dissimilar birds together can have
unpredictable results.
We have also found that some faults are very
hereditary and should never be bred from. It is often
difficult to pass over a bird with a bunch of stellar
features. However, if you don’t eliminate these faults
from your breeding program they can come back to
haunt you. Faults to avoid:
• Pinched heads (when viewing the bird from the
front the sides of the face come to the wattle at an
angle versus straight down)
• Wing Droopers / Shallow Backs (these often go
together)
• 13 tail feathers
• Cross beaks
• Bull eyes
• Severely Cracked Eyes / Bad Eyes
• Excessive eye brows (where the features protrude
out over the eye from the side of the head)
The above lists are not all inclusive but provide
some general guidelines that we use in the breeding
pen. Remember that balance is key and try not to do
too much at one time. If a mating doesn’t work out,
break up the pair and balance them against other birds.
Many National Champions have come out of stock
pairs, with minor imperfections, that have balanced
well and produced great youngsters.•