After a particularly difficult season with pigeons for fanciers in most provinces, the time has arrived for the young birds races, a competition viewed, many times, completely differently by Romanian fanciers. While for some this championship is a clear target, others, quite a few, use these contests only for selection, not necessarily aiming to obtain some titles. Unfortunately, there is a third category of Romanian pigeon fans, who, for various more or less objective reasons, choose not to participate in these competitions. They prefer other methods of selection, flying their young alone or grouping around a fancier who owns a suitable means of transport to carry out private training.

Following a statistic of the last 2 seasons, we notice that Prahova county holds the supremacy in terms of the number of young birds engaged in the first stage of this season with young birds. if last season Prahoven engaged 19,464 young birds in the first stage, this year the number decreased a little: 17,321 birds in the first stages of the 3 different flight plans. In this top of the counties, in second place is Suceava, which basketed a number of 13,860 in the first stage of the 2021 season. In the 2022 season, the number of young birds basketed in this county was in sharp decline, the fanciers from Suceava basketed only 7,438 birds at the first stages of the 2 flight plans. On a virtual 3rd place we find Brașov, with a total of 12,166 pigeons basketedin both seasons. In 2021, Brașov fanciers brought 5,914 young birds to the first stage, and this season 6,252. Among the counties that failed to organize flights with young birds in both seasons, 2021-2022, or from which a very small number of fanciers fly with a small number of young birds, are Braila, Bistrita Năsăud, Călăraşi, Galați, Ialomița , Mureș, Teleorman, Tulcea, Vaslui, Vrancea, Iasi, Sibiu and Giurgiu.

One more detail should be added to this brief analysis. At this year’s Racing Pigeons Olympiad, from Oradea, the results of the Romanians in the young birds category were some meritorious ones. As we reported in the past weeks, the team of Călin + Buzura (Dolj) and Nicolae Valentin Staicu (Prahova) managed to occupy second place on the Olympic podium. This says a lot about the value of young birds competition in certain counties in Romania.

Table: