After being injured during a race starting in Oklahoma, a homing pigeon got a little help last month from Eden Prairie police – and made it back home to its Chaska owner.
The pigeon’s owner brought it to Oklahoma for a race days before an Eden Prairie resident found the injured bird in their yard on July 17, according to Community Service Officer Dmitry Ivanov, who helped return the pigeon to its home.
Ivanov said another officer responded to a call about an injured pigeon with tags near Anderson Lakes Parkway. When the officer arrived, he was able to pick up the bird and noted it appeared to have a broken wing.
Ivanov told the officer to bring the pigeon back to the police station so they could monitor and care for it. After consulting with an off-duty animal control officer, they decided to keep the bird in a cage overnight with water to see if the wing would heal.
When he arrived at the station the next day, Ivanov said, the pigeon’s wing had not healed and it still couldn’t fly.
Ivanov said he had never dealt with a situation like this before, so he went to Wild Birds Unlimited, a store that specializes in bird feeding products, for ideas on what to do.
“I didn’t exactly know what to do with a pigeon with tags on it,” he said. “I haven’t had to deal with that before.”
The owner of Wild Birds Unlimited searched several databases to help find the bird’s owner, Ivanov said. They tracked the bird down to a club of racing pigeons, which passed along the contact information for the pigeon’s owner.
When the owner stopped by the police station to pick up the pigeon, he was happy to have it back. He told Ivanov he owns several other racing pigeons that haven’t returned home, either because they got lost or were attacked by hawks.
“He took the pigeon out of the box with his hands, and was just holding it and petting it,” Ivanov said. “And he was very happy to get his pigeon back.”
Ivanov said the pigeon was only a few miles away from its house when it got injured.
According to The Royal Pigeon Racing Association, pigeon racing involves sending off homing pigeons from the same start location, where they then fly back to their own homes.
The pigeon’s owner told Ivanov that homing pigeons can travel up to 600 miles in a day and are able to return home from virtually anywhere.
Now that the owner has his pigeon back, he plans to rehabilitate the bird and retire it from racing, keeping it as a pet, Ivanov said.
The department recounted the story in a July 28 entry on its Eden Prairie Police blog.
Ivanov said that if you find an injured pigeon, you should call Eden Prairie police, and they’ll help reunite it with its owner.
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