Nov/December 2025

CHINESE OWLS – Page 38 – Purebred PIGEON Breed of the Issue - CHINESE OWLS How Important Is Color In Chinese Owls? By Dick Holmberg T he National Chinese Owl Club’s Standard of Perfection allocates 10 points to color. That is not a small amount but do our judges really put much weight on color? I think that depends on the color with some judges. I certainly agree that the focus should be on a totally balanced bird stated in our new standard and there are a lot of other things to be considered, but is color being overlooked in some colors and over-emphasized in others? I believe this to be the case. In 2023, the NCOC club membership voted to accept the new color descriptions presented as an attachment to the written Standard of Perfection from 2021. Wes Price spent many hours wording the descriptions so they would help the reader visualize the proper colors. Unfortunately, we continued to see birds picked in the champion line- up that did not match the descriptions very well. Washed out blues, slate-colored blacks, qualmonds that could pass for milky blue bars, almonds lack- ing ground color and flecking, just to name a few. In my opinion, I believe we have had several birds place in the top 10 at major shows that should not have been awarded more than 5 points of the 10 allocated for color and most of those would be for the pattern part of it. I have asked a few judges why they didn’t dis- count a bird more for color and, sadly, the answer was “I don’t know what that color is supposed to look like.” I have found this to be true of judges in many other breeds. It’s not just us. Lack of educa- tion in the colors of our breeds seems to be all too common throughout the hobby in North America. In June of 2025, the NCOC published its new Member’s Handbook. Part of the beauty of the Handbook is the inclusion of colored pictures of all of the 34 recog- nized colors and 4 that would be classified as “any other color” (AOC). The pictures were inserted into the color description document to match them with the appropriate description. We worked with Gary Romig, well-known pigeon artist, to create three-quarter view pictures that match the written descriptions. Now all judges have easy access to what each color is supposed to look like, there- fore, eliminating any excuse for placing a very poor colored bird in the top 10. The quality of our Chinese Owls has improved throughout North America to the point where our judges should be able to find 10 high quality birds that have good color to put in their champion line-up. The pictures accompanying this article are of two birds bred by me so I guess I can criticize them. The three-quar- ter view is the ideal for a blue grizzle check. Note that the grizzle effect is throughout the bird as stated in the color description. The lighter one has very nice grizzle effect ev- erywhere except the head and part of the neck. He has been picked champion once and a reserve twice. I do not have a problem with that because his color problems are limited NCOC 2025 Member’s Handbook Color Description Showing Mealy Bar, Red Check, Lavendar, Cream Bar, Yellow Check and Cream. This is one of 9 pages.