posted 5 years ago
I raise pigeons. Although I have never utilized them as a food source for myself; I've used them for dog, cat, and pig food when my numbers get too high and I need to thin the flock.
I currently don't have any utility breeds, but have casually been looking for a pair to start with and see if they are worth raising as a meat source. At the moment my flock is a mix of Frillbacks (mostly), along with a few West of England Tumblers, Mookees, and common fantails; but there are very few purebreds left after years of keeping the flock together.
I initially planned to raise them for show, but life got in the way, so now they don't really serve any purpose.
Despite only having two eggs per clutch, they do reproduce quickly. Most of my pairs will start a second clutch of eggs before the previous chicks are fully fledged. I've never eaten the eggs, but I would think it would be similar to quail eggs. I don't do anything special for them for breeding; mostly just buy the plastic baskets from the Dollar Tree and zip tie them to the wire in the coop/loft. If there's not enough baskets available in the coop, they just make the nest on the ground. I will occasionally toss a bucket-full of hay or dried grass/weeds in the coop and they take what they want to build nests with. My birds breed year round, here (CenTex), but the eggs will sometimes spoil in the summer when they get too hot under the birds.
Pigeons oftentimes are called "rats with wings," but my birds tend to be really picky eaters. I usually give them a 2:1 mix of hen scratch and chicken crumble. They seem to prefer when I broadcast it across the ground instead of putting it in a feeder (but they waste a lot). I toss some oyster shell grit in every few months (when I have it). Fresh greens get offered weekly, but they tend to ignore them.
I keep a few different containers of water in the coop, and have to change it daily because they love to bathe in it.
Overall, my birds thrive on neglect, as long as I provide food & clean water; as well as protection from predators & shelter from extreme weather. There have been times I've had a malfunction with the coop, and they all got loose. While they stayed around the coop, and continued to roost in it at night, it didn't take long for a family of hawks to show up and decimate the population by more than half (pigeons are stupid and fly to the open sky when a predator bird shows up). Once I got them cooped up again, it didn't take long for them to rebuild the population.
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