My dad’s homing pigeon loft

Growing up in Kearney, Nebraska with a boatload of homing pigeons in lovingly maintained backyard lofts, home has always held such a uniquely ornithological bent. For my family and me, home has always involved pigeons.

And the fact that these pigeons have such a keen homing sense–some flying 500 miles from Texas to Kearney in a single day–makes our family home a place to which birds, children, their children, and friends return time and again. Our collective homing instinct for 611 West 27th Street is undeniably strong.

My siblings and I delighted our elementary classes with annual pigeon visits. Armed with a small canvas crate and a pigeon, we would lead our classmates to the playground, where we would release the pigeon amidst our teachers’ and friends’ cheers. The pigeon, bearing a class message in a small capsule attached to its leg, would fly several blocks to my family home. And then my dad would retrieve the message from the pigeon’s leg, so we could take it back to class the next day. Positive proof of the bird’s homing instinct. In one local newspaper photo, I was captured releasing a pigeon for my fourth grade class: Shannon Welch releases a homing pigeon (see blur) on the playground of Park Elementary School. 

Blue bars, grizzles, checks–all names for different kinds of homing pigeons, names found quickly within the pages of the national Racing Pigeon Digest, names that laced through dinner table talk, and names that became an integral part of our family vernacular.

Blue bar                     Photographer: George De La Nuez

In the sanctuary of homing, birds and people give into their heart instincts and move purposefully towards home. Through plains’ wind and rain, in spite of the compulsion to water and rest, we all drive on. My mom and I were just talking about my 13 hour drives from Wisconsin to Kearney. Stopping once for a bathroom break and with a trusty supply of peanut M & Ms on the passenger seat beside me, I drove on. Like my father’s pigeons, I had eyes for only one thing: home.

Homing pigeons take to the air to mark the start of Idaho’s annual Festival of Flight.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GREG KRELLER, IDAHO PRESS-TRIBUNE/AP

In Robert Frost’s narrative poem, “The Death of the Hired Man, ” Mary, the female protagonist, says, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In the sanctuary of homing, we have to go there. I beg to differ with Thomas Wolfe who wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. Not only can you go home again, for many (most?) of us, you must go home again. And when you do, they “have to take you in.” This is where you belong–through biology, through adoption, through spirit.

Homing is bone-bred. Miles from the places we call home, our bones quiver, pulsing like an anatomical GPS, urging us surely forward.

In G.K. Chesterton’s The Coloured Lands, a medley of fables, poetry, and original drawings, he writes:

It was his home now. But it could not be his home until he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son. 

In the sanctuary of homing, we are all prodigals. Having gone from and returned, we earn the right to announce, I’m home. And for those of us who are truly blessed–pigeons or people–the right to hear these homing words: Well done, my good and faithful servant.