View from the North 40: It's like a fortune just flew in and poohed on my car

I am sitting on a gold mine or, more specifically, I’m fixin’ to hatch me a gold mine.

Those stinkin’ pigeons in my barn that I’ve been complaining about for years? They could be worth money, real money, like really real money, according to an article in Reuters.

In November, a 2-year-old racing pigeon from Belgium sold at auction for — are you sitting down? You should be sitting down for this because the pigeon sold for $1.89 million.

One point eight nine MILLION dollars. For a stinkin’ pigeon. And I have a barn full of them doing nothing with their lives but breedin’, feedin’ and poopin’. They’re worse than trust-fund babies with an entitlement complex.

I’m not one to fall for get-rich quick schemes, but I might make an exception to put a pigeon to work in the elite sport of pigeon racing, where a group of buyers in South Africa formed a pigeon breeders’ consortium to offer $1.55 million for a young pigeon — and then got outbid by a couple of Chinese buyers who duked it out in a final-frenzy bidding war until one emerged victorious $340,000 dollars later.

The excitement must’ve been palpable.

It turns out that it’s not a surprise that a Belgian pigeon is a record high-seller. Pigeon racing is the European soccer of Belgium, where 20,000 pigeon fanciers compete all year. It’s the homeland of the previous record high-selling pigeon — $1.48 million.

The new world record price holder, a female pigeon named New Kim, earned the title of best young bird in Belgium back in 2018. Then she got to drop out of the competition circuit into a leisurely life of retirement. All she had to do was keep plunking out some eggs for her handlers — which she was going to do anyway. Trust me, you can’t stop a pigeon from producing eggs anymore than you can keep them from whitewashing the world with their pigeon poo.

The website for Pigeon Control Resource Centre in England said pigeons can have up to eight batches of babies in a year, with usually two eggs in each batch.

(I interrupt this column to launch a related Fun fact: PCRC also says that the Reuters news organization owes its start in Europe to carrier pigeons, which they used to send news and stock prices from Aachen, Germany, to the home office in Brussels, Belgium, because the telegraph system at the time was too unreliable in Belgium.)

But 16 new pigeons per year, per mama pigeon? Now I’m seeing dollar signs where I used to see targets of my aggression. I know those baby pigeons can’t all be racing gems, but I think it’s fair to say that each of those baby pigeons would be like a lottery ticket — an instrument of hope for a more monetarily enhanced tomorrow.

The PCRC site says that pigeons are smart. I don’t know if my barn pigeons are as smart as a magpie or a crow, but I’m hoping they’ll get the gist of the conversation when I negotiate a contract with them to try out for my racing team, the North 40 Express, maybe help recruit some of their speedier birds of a feather to the team.

I’m willing to build the pigeons a house of their own, provide easy access to nutritious food and filtered water, offer them protection from the occasional bird of prey and cat of kills-stuff.

As an investment scheme, I see it as a win-win. Even if my country pigeons turn out to be slow duds, plodding through the air no faster than the average dirigible airship, the PCRC website assures me that their pigeon droppings have value, too, like having, well, maybe not a silver mine, but perhaps a bronze or tin mine.

In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries pigeon pooh was considered a highly valued product. For real, the website says. It was considered such a valuable source of fertilizer that armed guards protected dovecotes — which are just large, fancy pigeon coops. Pigeon dropping were the only source of saltpeter for gunpowder in the 16th Century. In Iran, eating pigeons was forbidden and dovecotes were established just as a source of fertilizer for melon crops.

With pandemic gardens on the rise, that nasty stinkin’ pigeon poop will actually be a welcome sight, like makin’ it rain greenbacks in the red-light district.

I look outside, now, at those rats with wings circling my barn and all I can think is, “One of you little poop-machines could be my golden ticket to a life of leisure.”

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Another fun fact: Doves are just mutant white pigeons. Think about it at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .