[acoustic guitar]
Waking up to greet the day...
- Liz Beukema: 4:20 every morning, my alarm goes off.
I catch all the birds and get them in the truck.
- Liz Beukema has had this same routine
for more than a decade.
- Liz Beukema: That may be why... [laughs]
May be why it's a low-participation sport.
- Pigeon racing became popular in Belgium 200 years ago,
and has spread worldwide.
- Fond du Lac has a really active pigeon community.
Milwaukee...
La Crosse has a big club down there.
- But for Liz, finding other female racers
is not very common.
- It's actually fairly rare.
There's not many of us, but it's fun to find each other. [laughs]
So, they're gonna come out.
I'm gonna start with this first one.
[Liz claps]
We release birds about half an hour after sun up, ideally.
- Garrett Beukema: I guess it's sort of a rare sport,
and it's always changing.
- Even more rare...
- We're the only ones I know of.
- A mom and son competing against each other.
- Garrett: This is one of our young birds.
- Garrett got his start
after someone gifted him racing pigeons.
- We started with 10, and now we have 200. [chuckles]
- For Garrett and Liz,
life on the farm would never be the same.
- I started because Garrett was 10,
and he couldn't drive his birds down the road to train.
I was just kind of along for the ride.
I never had a team at first.
Garrett flew for two years without me having a team.
I try to get all scientific,
and Garrett's just like, "Ah, it's all good."
And then, he ends up winning every week.
- Winning also requires a lot of time spent with your birds.
- Garrett: You're up every morning and training,
and every weekend, you're racing.
And it gets pretty busy.
- But we start out slow.
We'll go half a mile, we'll go two miles,
we'll go five miles, and just practice.
They flew 90 miles this morning on a training run.
- Pigeon racing can sometimes cover 400 miles,
and the first bird home in the fastest time wins.
- We want them to have visual clues.
I want them to see the river
and know that "I need to get across the river
in order to get home."
- On race day,
the farm is quiet
until the pigeons start arriving back home.
- You get a message saying, "Yep, the birds were released
from, let's say, Ames, Iowa, at 7 a.m."
And then, you sit in the silence in the yard
and wait for birds to land on Saturday morning.
When they come in,
ideally, they hear me whistle from across the yard,
and they land immediately
and go in to eat.
[pigeons cooing, Liz whistling]
We whistle every time they're fed
from the time they're born.
Come on, baby.
Young birds, food is their motivation.
They're coming home for food.
- The science behind how the pigeons
actually navigate their way home
remains a mystery.
- Liz: It's magic.
The scientists still-- to this day-- don't know.
- A lot of people say they use the sun.
A lot of people say landmarks
and maybe it's a little bit of both.
During pigeon racing,
you're just releasing them up in the sky
and praying that they come back.
- When they return home,
a sensor records the time each bird enters the loft.
- We're always looking to see whose bird comes home first.
- On race day, it's kind of exciting
to figure out where you sit.
- Garrett: I guess we get pretty competitive some days.
I believe I won my first race in...
gosh, I don't know what year it was, but I was pretty young.
- Garrett was on a streak at one point
where he had beat me in every race
for 16 straight races.
So, that needed to come to an end really quickly.
[laughs]
- Through the years, the birds got better.
- They double in size every day.
By 30 days, they're fully grown.
- The bond between mom and son grew stronger.
- We spent a lot of invaluable time together,
the two of us, with these birds over the years.
- And the need for Garrett
to spread his wings
took flight.
- I think I'll miss race day the most.
Sitting out on the porch
and just waiting for the birds to fly over.
- Garrett is heading off to school,
leaving Mom to fly solo.
- A lot of the guys at the club
have kind of kidded me about that,
how I lost all my good help
and all my... all my magic.
To me, it's very interesting. [laughs]
They're just amazing animals.
I'm talking to the other guys in the club
to see if I won or lost. [laughs]
I love it!
[pigeons chirping]