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When champion pigeon racer Tom Van Gaver walked into one of his lofts one morning last November, he immediately knew something was wrong. Part of the door had been smashed from the inside. He soon realised it was no accident: thieves had broken into his aviary in Moortsele in Flanders and stolen five birds, including Finn, one of his most renowned breeders. Father and grandfather to many champions, Finn was “the Mona Lisa of the pigeon world”, Van Gaver said.
The five birds, he estimates, were worth €750,000 (£625,000), but like da Vinci’s masterpiece, it is hard to tell, because he had no plans to sell. He had ordered a retirement loft so his oldest birds could live out their days under more sun. Instead, CCTV footage shows one of the thieves snatching Finn and bundling the delicate jade-necked dark bird into a plastic bag.
“Of course you feel sad and upset,” Van Gaver told the Guardian. But his first thought was fixing the weak point in his security. The Belgian and international champion, feted for the endurance of his birds, already had cameras, locks and sensors.
But he had not bargained on thieves breaking in through a loft roof, having chopped down hedges in his neighbours’ gardens to reach his property. Now his home is separated with a fence bearing laser sensors and cameras. “It is like a prison in my garden.”
The theft of Van Gaver’s pigeons is only one of the latest thefts to hit pigeon racing in Belgium, renowned as the birthplace of the sport. “The problem has always existed … but in the last year it has exploded,” said Patrick Marsille, secretary general of the Royal Belgian Pigeon Federation, speaking in an interview at its headquarters in Halle, south of Brussels.
The association estimated that up to 15 thefts had taken place between October and mid February, with perhaps about 500 birds stolen. Well-organised criminal gangs from eastern Europe are suspected of targeting particular birds or owners, with the goal of seizing champions to breed their offspring. “It is not at all by chance. It is a network that is very well organised, that knows exactly what it wants,” Marsille said.
The Descheemaecker Pigeon Centre, near Antwerp, which has been breeding racing birds since 1955, has taken greater precautions against theft in the last decade. The centre, which claims to be the largest and oldest pigeon-racing breeding station in the world, is secured by a wall and locked doors, monitored by cameras and a concierge. Stephan Descheemaecker, whose grandfather co-founded the business with a pigeon magazine in 1930, thinks he can spot a potential thief.
“We know from the beginning when they enter and start looking around and looking to the cameras above them. We know that they are not coming to have a look at pigeons, that they are coming to scan the environment to see what can be taken, or how good the security is.”
Pigeon racing, once described as the horse racing of the poor, took root in the coal-mining region around Liège in 19th-century Belgium, reaching its heyday after the second world war, with about 200,000 fanciers in 1950. These days interest in the time-consuming hobby has waned. At the same time animal welfare activists and ethicists have criticised the sport for the stress imposed on birds kept in baskets before races and losses of pigeons in gruelling long-distance competitions.
The Belgian Pigeon Federation says it requires its members to make the wellbeing of their animals a priority. For many fanciers, the sport is about more than competition – it’s about the companionship of the birds, the pursuit of breeding champions, and the thrill of the race.
In a typical competition, pigeons are released from one spot and fly back to their lofts, covering hundreds of kilometres. The winner is the fastest bird, measured in metres per minute, using an ankle tag linked to a loft sensor. In contrast to the millisecond-precise technology, no one really knows how pigeons find their way home. For years it was suggested that birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to guide them, but some scientists lean to the theory that sense of smell and spatial awareness are what counts.
Fanciers look for a good eye, long muscles, quality feathers, but those characteristics do not reveal whether a bird has a good orientation. “It’s only with racing that you will find out,” Descheemaecker said. “An ugly pigeon becomes a beautiful pigeon after winning prizes every week.”
While it’s possible to get started with a €25 bird, or donations from other fanciers, elite birds command huge prices. One of stolen Finn’s children was recently sold for €45,000. In 2020 a Chinese buyer set a record paying €1.6m for the Belgian pigeon, New Kim.
Despite the big money, Frans Bungeneers, a retired police inspector and pigeon racer, believes thefts of the birds are not a priority for Belgian police or prosecutors.
Bungeneers was twice Belgium’s national champion in the renowned Barcelona race, the ultra marathon of pigeon racing, where birds fly from Catalonia to northern Europe, usually travelling more than 1,000km. But months after this exceptional double victory, his world was shattered.
Thieves stole 60 of his pigeons in 2016, including Iron Lady Ellie, his first-placed international ace pigeon. In one night the strain of champions he had been breeding for 16 years was gone. “I cried like a little boy when I saw it in the morning; it was unbelievable,” he told the Guardian. “The ground under my feet was gone.”
Prosecutors were not very interested in pursuing the case at first. “The prosecutor said: ‘Gentlemen we are not going to prosecute for chickens and rabbits – and now you ask for pigeons!’” he recalled.
His tenacity paid off. In 2020 three Romanians were sentenced in absentia to 30 months in jail and fined €340,000, the value of the pigeons, according to the Belgian trial judge, he said. But they never served the time. Bungeneers got neither compensation nor his pigeons, despite tracing them to locations in Romania near the Ukrainian border. The retired police inspector, who now advises other victims, does not believe he would have got the same result without knowing the system.
In most cases, he says, pigeon thefts are classified as a simple crime that generates a report, rather than a serious crime triggering an investigation where police are empowered to check mobile phone use and CCTV near the scene. “To get results in pigeon theft you need to act fast.”
Despite the devastating setback, Bungeneers still races pigeons. Van Gaver has no plans to stop: “When you are a pigeon fancier you normally never quit.”
Descheemaecker says that all pigeon fanciers dream of having the best pigeon this year. He describes that moment waiting for his birds to return to the loft: “It is the excitement of a pigeon which was released 500 miles away returning … and seeing it falling out of the sky.”
