pigeon fancier

Hiya,

Have you ever heard the word liberation used for pigeons?

I was 19 and house sharing in Perth with a guy called Gary. A pigeon racer (pigeon fancier, officially. I love this term). Pigeon stuff everywhere in the house. Magazines on the coffee table. Feed in the laundry. A loft at the end of the backyard, up on a little deck you could see the birds from the kitchen window.

The loft smelt like feathers and dirt. Gary kept it spotless. He knew every one of those birds. I recognised his hyperfocus before I ever had a word for my own.

Gary would drive up to four hours to the release point. Drop the birds. Drive back. And the moment that mattered wasn't the release.

It was the arrival home that mattered.

Because the timing clock in the loft doesn't stop when a bird lands. It stops when the bird goes inside, through a one-way door called the trap. If a bird lands on the roof and sits there, Gary called it bad trapping. Said it like a serious character flaw and it would be all hands-on deck to get that bird inside. Gary had special feed to pull them through. A whole ritual around the trap.

I've thought about quite a bit over the years.

There's something else about these birds. They find their way home from hundreds of kilometres away using three separate systems. The Earth's magnetic field. The position of the sun. Visual landmarks. An almost-GPS, built in.

There's a disaster movie called Geostorm with the gorgeous Gerard Butler where birds fall out of the sky because the magnetic field is disrupted. I watched it years later and thought: Gary would have been devastated if they were his birds.

When he released them, they all went up together. One enormous flock from the same spot at the same time.

The liberation, they call it. I love that name.

It looks like a team sport. It isn't. Everyone looks the same. They aren’t.

The experienced birds break from the pack. Find their own line. Their own most direct route. Not looking where the others are going.

Their own way showing their specialness, and their individuality.

Gary always watched for one bird. A male pied brown pigeon. He had white splotches across his wings and Gary would hear him before we could see him.

This bird was usually at the front, clocked in first and went through the trap door like a pro. Four hours from home. Still fastest back.

He knew where he was going. He only needed to be let out to run his own race.

I've thought about that pied pigeon occasionally, and as I am writing this, realise why my fascination for pigeon prints and gorgeous hair clips ( Go check out Bea Bellingham on Instagram) is so strong, I have pigeons in my blood from decades ago.

As women with brains like ours, we have our own systems too. We have a strong internal compass, and it’s the thing that knows exactly where home is, what is right for us and also what isn’t.

But most of us spent decades being told our way of navigating was wrong. So, we learned to hide our own sense of direction. Eventually we forgot it was there, we hid it so well we started to believe it never existed.

Sparkle Club is like the loft. The safe place to come back to. Everyone starts together, but you run your own race, your way, your timeline. Opens 1 September.

And if any of this is bringing something up for you, or you've been wondering whether there's support out there for a brain like yours, I'd love to hear from you. I genuinely love hearing from women founders who want to grow their businesses.

Mel x

P.S. Gary's bird came home first. Most times. Not because someone carried him. Because he had a loft worth coming back to, and three navigation systems nobody had ever told him to be ashamed of.

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ADHD Village- PO Box 475, Clifton Hill, 3068, Australia