Hearts of Britain’s Pigeon Fanciers Take Wing Along With Their Birds : Hobbies: Pigeon racing was once strictly a blue-collar sport, but now even Queen Elizabeth has a loft for her birds.

CHELTENHAM, England —  From the blue-collar housing projects of cockney east London to the gardens of the gentry, grown men scan the skies for hours most weekends, waiting for their pigeons to race home.

They rhapsodize about pigeon racing, the sport known as “the fancy” and now one of Britain’s more popular pastimes.

“All you see is a pinprick in the sky,” said Maj. Edward Camilleri. “They fly toward you and you hope its yours. Then they fold their wings, they drop out of the sky, they literally do. They come straight down like bullets.”

Says Bernie Bennett, who has 60 pigeons: “Unless you’re a pigeon fancier, you just find it very hard to understand, to see a person out in the garden, like me yesterday, bucketing down with rain, looking for pigeons to come from 100 miles.

“With pigeons, I find one thing and one thing only: You’re the jury, you’re the prosecution, you are the judge. All that happens down in your back yard is down to you.”

Camilleri, a retired soldier who runs the Royal Pigeon Racing Assn., estimates that Britain has more than 200,000 pigeon breeders and racers among its 56 million people.

Nearly 2 million pigeons, many with meticulously documented pedigrees dating back several avian generations, are registered with Camilleri’s association alone.

The sport has an honorable history: The ancient Egyptians kept pigeons; Hannibal took them over the Alps; they served in both world wars, carrying messages for the Allied intelligence forces in Europe. Thirty-one pigeons were awarded the Dickens Medal, the “Animal Victoria Cross,” in World War II.

In Britain, pigeons were traditionally associated with beer-drinking, cloth-capped men, but the pastime has moved upmarket in recent years, attracting lawyers, actors and titans of industry. At the top end of the scale, Queen Elizabeth II maintains a pigeon loft.

Britain’s largest pigeon breeder, Louella Pigeon World, is a high-tech enterprise that paid a world record 77,000 pounds ($120,120) in 1988 for the racing pigeon Emerald II.

“That, pound for pound, makes it more valuable than the Derby winner,” Camilleri said, referring to Britain’s most prestigious horse race.

Emerald II is moved from one secret location to another, because with the large sums sometimes at stake in bets and prize money, sabotage and pigeon-napping are not unheard of.

However, high prices don’t always guarantee success, Camilleri said, and a good racing pigeon can start as low as 20 pounds ($32).

“Stockmanship comes into it, knowing and understanding pigeons,” he explained. “They all have their individual characters and what you’ve got to do is understand their character well enough and encourage them to come home quicker than the next pigeon.”

No one knows exactly how pigeons find their way home after being released, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

“The sun is definitely one (factor) and magnetic field is definitely a second,” Camilleri said. Research in Europe indicates that the sense of smell also may help.

There’s also a very basic urge.

Most pigeons in Britain are kept on the “widowhood system.” As soon as a hen and cock produce a pair of young, or squeakers, they’re separated. Only the males are raced, and the only time they get to see their hens is when they return to the loft at the end of a race.

Each fancier’s loft is registered and the distance between it and any of the 200 official British “liberation sites” measured to the nearest yard.

Pigeons are bundled into baskets, sometimes the night before a race, and taken to the liberation site in air-conditioned trucks. Each wears a rubber band about the size of a wedding ring on its leg with the details of where it came from.

The pigeons are all released at the same time. They ascend rapidly, quickly become oriented and head for home.

When they land, the fancier removes the rubber band and puts it in a time clock that is sealed and taken to the local racing club. The flight distance is divided by the time it took to determine who won the race.

What is it about pigeons that engenders such passion and loyalty?

“The fascination about it: You get a few pigeons, you start winning races, and from then on it’s a lot like horse racing, only cheaper,” Camilleri said.

“You can pit your wits against nature.”