Pigeon racing's popularity is soaring among China's wealthy, producing sky-high bids for champion pedigree - and unintended consequences ranging from import-tax spats to pirates who trap and ransom the birds. Erik Nilsson reports.

The bird bomb detonates. Its payload - millions of yuan worth of pigeons - explodes out of the truck's door like shrapnel with wings. Win or lose the war they seemingly don't realize is before their beaks, they're instinctively flying home.

That's what homing pigeons do. Scientists don't know why. Or how.

Yet it's their species' namesake.

And these birds have long been used in actual combat in China, perhaps without realizing it. They've delivered messages from dynastic upheavals through the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

That's not to say their use hasn't been mostly peaceful. And Mandarin makes no distinction between pigeons and doves.

They were essentially an ancient take on delivery drones. Couriers on the ground simply couldn't match their speed.

The 153 racing birds released in Beijing's Baige Park for the Iron Pigeon Triatholon, hosted by Jiangsu Broadcasting Corp's loft, are not only combatants for, but also trophies of, the superrich. They're status symbols - like Ferraris with feathers.

Some get lost. Some fall prey to raptors. An equally unknown number are "bird-napped".

So much money flying through the skies has produced pirates on the ground, who bait, net and ransom pricey pigeons.

"There's no guarantee every bird will find its way home," Beijing Blue Feather pigeon trainer Wang Jinhai explains.

"A pigeon's previous competitions are invalidated if it doesn't complete a race. So people set up nets along routes. After they nab a pigeon, they call its owner to demand ransom."

Wang trains his pigeons by letting them fly near his loft daily and calls them back by playing Kenny G's Going Home.

"We use the same song every day, so pigeons are conditioned to the signal," he says.

The more distance they sojourn, the fewer pigeons return.

Blue Feather staged a five-leg race this year. The last contest required the birds to fly 500 kilometers from Henan province's Qi county to Beijing. Only 1,420 of 2,205 birds made it within the time limit.

And just 42 of 153 pigeons finished the 1,000-km route of the Jiangsu Radio and Television Station Loft's competition in time. The distance is exceptional, even for China, where more endurance contests are staged than in Europe, which has long dominated the industry.

Few races outside the country exceed 500 km.

The centuries-old practice of training homing pigeons in China has been given new wings in recent years. The emergent elite are propelling prices for what is otherwise a fowl archetypically considered "rats with wings" in the West and delicious in China.

A Chinese buyer set the world record price for a pigeon purchase - at 310,000 euros ($425,000) - in a Belgian auction in May. The bid for the bird, named Bolt after Jamaica's Olympic gold-medal sprinter Usain Bolt, overtook the previously unprecedented 250,000 euros another Chinese paid for a Dutch pigeon in 2012.

But Bolt hit a hurdle entering China in an import-duty dispute between China and Belgium that Reuters reports held 1,600 birds in legal limbo in September. He was among the first 400 birds released during negotiations.

Bolt is retired. If he were to fly, he'd try to head back to Belgium. He's instead spending his days in Beijing as a ladies man, breeding the next generation of pricey pigeons for local races.

Champion pigeons' offspring can command top dollar, since "birds without blue blood" are believed to rarely scoop prizes.

On Nov 20, the Pioneer (Beijing) International Pigeon Racing Club's fall auction for the champion pigeons set a national record for total revenue at 16.8 million yuan ($2.77 million), according to pigeon-racing website Xingechina.com. The 225 birds sold for an average of 74,000 yuan apiece.

Auctioneers accepted cash only.

It was an intense five hours of bidding, starting at 10,000 yuan per bird. Every bid had to add at least 2,000 yuan.

The crowd stood to gawk at the biggest buyers when the top 10 birds went on the block. The highest-valued pigeon was a second-place competitor that went for 1.5 million yuan.

The bird's previous owner Xi Jinwen says: "I wanted to buy my pigeon back."

But Xi stopped bidding at 1.4 million yuan.

That said, cheaper contestants sometimes beat exorbitantly priced champions.

Ankle bands for races - separate from the ID bands issued by the Chinese Pigeon Racing Association - range in cost, too, from 50 to more than 5,000 yuan.

Bands prevent cheating. But also, the more a person pays for the band, the more he stands to win, since prize money comes from the bands' sales.

The Chinese Pigeon Racing Association is the only authorized ID band producer and also registers every racing club in the country.

It sells more than 10 million ID bands a year and boasts more than 300,000 members. Competitions take place in the fall and spring, as the weather is too extreme the rest of the year.

China hosts two types of races.

The first is organized by associations and clubs, whose members raise and train their own pigeons.

The other kind is the single-loft race. Pigeon owners send their newborn birds to the organizer, who feeds and trains the animals together for about half a year before they compete.

Convenience has made this category more popular in recent years.

Ordinary Beijingers commonly raised their own pigeons, until the 1990s, and whistles attached to their birds' leg bands were part of the city's din.

The municipal government began massive citywide renovations that decade, and many hutong were demolished, along with the rooftop bungalows locals used as pigeon lofts.

Wang Jianguo recalls raising 30 pigeons in his courtyard home in the Dongdan area then.

"My neighbors protested when I installed a loft in my high rise apartment, so I had to give up," the 59-year-old recalls.

Last year, he bought a yard where he raises 200 birds. He hired a trainer to care for the creatures and visits every three days.

"I'll join some races this spring," he says.

Wang Jinhai, the Beijing Blue Feather trainer, recalls his uncle raised pigeons in the '80s and gave him a pair when he was a boy.

"But my parents forbade me from raising pigeons," the 43-year-old says.

"So I hid them in our courtyard's coal pile."

While pigeon raising and racing were legalized after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), they were residually viewed as capitalist pursuits.

"I couldn't find my birds when I returned from school one day," Wang recalls. "My parents had found the nest and ate my precious pets. I was heartbroken."

But his childhood experience enticed his interest in the 1990s, when his pigeons won many prizes.

Wang Jinhai took to the trade full time in 2004, and now raises up to 4,000 birds a year as Blue Feather's chief trainer.

The loft typically receives squabs not yet 45 days old from February to March.

"Pigeons only recognize one home their entire lives," Wang Jinhai explains.

"So if the birds are too old when they come here, they might not recognize our loft as home and fly back to their owners' homes during training."

The birds' drills start with hovering above the loft after Wang Jinhai puts them to the sky at 6 am and teaches them to return to Kenny G's crooning at noon.

Wang spends the time they're gone inspecting their droppings.

"The droppings indicate their health," Wang says. "One sick bird could infect the flock. So I must check their feces carefully."

Wang feeds them multigrain mixes, beans and corn. He adds gravel and nutrition powders to enhance digestion and vitality.

Pigeon-care products' retail is another dimension of the racing market.

Hong Kong Maker Racing Pigeon Appliances sales representative Zhuang Yaling's company sells cages, bands, whistles, gravel and powders.

"Gravel and powders are our biggest sellers," she says.

Trainings' second stage usually begins in July.

Wang and his colleagues take the birds further from the loft each time, starting from less than 1 km and moving up to 300.

Come the next competition season, they'll become the next salvo of pigeons launched into in the country's rocketing racing sector.

And there's no sign the industry's trajectory in China will descend anytime soon, as sky-high profits continue to propel it to new heights.

Contact the writer at erik_nilsson@chinadaily.com.cn

Xing Yi contributed to this story.

More than 60,000 pigeons set off during the 8th China Pigeon Race at the Zhengzhou Sports Center in 2007. The birds came from more than 10 provinces and municipalities. Provided to China Daily

A pigeon raiser presents the wing of his star pigeon at the China Carrier Pigeon Culture Expo at the new China World International Exhibition and Conference Center in Chaoyang district of Beijing in November. Xing Yi / China Daily

The Pioneer (Beijing) International Pigeon Racing Club's fall auction is hosted by Xue Xiaojian. Xing Yi / China Daily

(China Daily 01/12/2014 page1)