Abbotsford doesn't allow pet pigeons. Chicken farmers want it to stay that way.

A few pigeons swoop low over the trees, silhouetted against an overcast sky. Life-long pigeon trainer and breeder (or fancier) Gurbir Brar points them out as it begins to rain. They had gotten lost, and they were late, the fancier says, but they still made it home to Brar’s farm in West Abbotsford.

He trains new birds to race every year. Both a product of their carefully tailored genetics and their training, the birds will be able to find their home from hundreds of kilometres away.

Under those long flight paths, though, live hundreds of farmers on a constant lookout for signs of illness in their chickens. After the disastrous avian flu outbreaks, wild birds travelling long distances present a “grave” concern to some poultry farmers.

Brar wants Abbotsford to legalize keeping pet pigeons in residential areas to help the sport he loves thrive. But the city’s poultry farmers are strongly opposed to the idea.

Under the eaves of his barn and out of the rain, Brar spreads crumpled, colourful pages on a table. The papers map the genealogy of his prize birds, some of which hail from a world-class line of British pigeons. Winning racers can breed winning racers, he explains. Two birds who have made a good racer before can make another. And pigeons do plenty of breeding.

The format of the sport, and its reliance on genetics, can make it hyper-competitive. A fancier might protect the heritage of their birds so the genetics they cultivated so carefully will never beat one of their own birds in a race.

Brar holds to the exact opposite line of thinking. Pigeon racing, when done best, involves sharing birds and information, he believes. In the case of Abbotsford, that also means trying to help legalize the slowly growing sport, despite opposition from local industry.

Brar got his first pair of pigeons from a friend of his father’s. These days, he returns the favour and gives pigeons to young birders in Abbotsford who want to get started in the sport.

He also races the offspring of birds from well-known fanciers he knows. He records how their specific combinations of genetics fare, then lets their breeders know the results so they can use that information to know which birds to breed again. The new fanciers that Brar introduces often do the same for him.

“We still know how the birds do [when we give them away]” he said. “I still get the information back.”

The sport—at least the way Brar practices it—is built on trading information, sharing knowledge, and sharing birds.

He credits his birds with helping him achieve a stable and happy life, and believes keeping, training, and caring for birds can help others in the same ways. He grew up riding the school bus with friends who became involved in gang activity or developed substance abuse problems. Brar never did. Instead, every day, he got off the bus and clambered into the pigeon lofts in his backyard, still in his school uniform.

“It's the one thing that always kept me grounded,” he said. “My focus was always coming back to the pigeons.”

But Abbotsford has never allowed pet pigeons in residential neighbourhoods.

The birds are considered poultry under the city’s bylaws, and raising them is defined as an agricultural use of the land.

Raising livestock is generally banned in residential areas. The tenuous state of any flock in most built-up parts of the city, therefore, is dependent largely on whether or not the neighbours complain. When they do, bylaw officers arrive and inform the pigeon owners that their birds have to be moved.

The need to move around and, for some, rent farm properties makes the sport more expensive and precarious for the 40 to 50 fanciers that, Brar estimates, keep flocks in Abbotsford.

Those extra costs also cut into one of the big benefits of pigeons. Tending dogs and horses can teach life skills and aid emotional wellness—but the animals are expensive to feed and look after. Keeping pigeons, Brar said, provides the same benefits at a fraction of the cost. Pigeons cost about $1 a month to feed. One of Brar’s German shepherds, bouncing about in their pens on the farm, can cost $100 a month.

Home on the farm

The costs of moving his birds from place to place have added up for Brar. He began getting bylaw complaints after moving to a new Abbotsford neighborhood in 2013. His previous neighbours said they enjoyed the quiet cooing of the pigeons in the evening. His new neighbours didn’t.

When bylaw officers asked Brar to move his birds, he rebuilt their lofts at his sister’s house. When they started annoying his sister, he moved the flock to his high school wrestling coach’s backyard. Then he rented farmland outside the city for $800 a month for his beloved hobby.

In 2016, Brar spoke to Abbotsford city council and asked them to change the bylaw that makes keeping birds in the city illegal. Council declined to do so, though, and so Brar moved the birds one final time.

Today, the pigeons live happily—and legally—in lofts surrounded by small grassy fields, an antique tractor, a pair of german shepherds, and a few peacocks. After saving for five years and selling the family business, Brar and his parents bought a small farm in Aldergrove.

Though the bylaw forbidding pigeons in urban Abbotsford no longer applies to him, Brar continues to advocate for allowing the birds in residential neighbourhoods. He wants the sport to thrive.

It is not an entirely selfless act. Brar is also realistic about the future of his flock and his farm. The mortgage on the land is hefty.

“Financially, you never know, anything could happen,” Brar said. He might need to move back into town someday: “Then I could be in the same boat as [those currently living in residential areas].”

Pigeons and Chickens

When Brar went to city hall for the second time a few weeks ago, he presented to a group made up of four farmers and a city council member: the Abbotsford Agricultural Advisory Committee.

Brar walked into the meeting prepared with a pigeon licensing proposal. He wants fanciers to be accountable to the city for how they keep their birds and be given licenses to do so. In turn, he says they should be able to keep them in lofts in their backyards within the city—just like pet dogs are licensed. (But better, he argues: pigeons are cheaper and quieter than dogs.)

But when he left the meeting, he compared it to a death sentence.

“I imagined myself as somebody that’s been ordered to be executed,” he said. “And I'm pleading my case to the executioners.”

The committee voted against supporting urban pigeon keeping. That means the proposal likely won’t make it up to city council.

Though Abbotsford is not alone in keeping pet pigeons out of residential areas, other nearby municipalities let the birds stay in town. Langley and Surrey both allow flocks of a certain size. Brar cited the nearby municipalities when drawing up his licensing proposal.

The big difference between Abbotsford and its increasingly-urban neighbours? Chickens.

Poultry farmers in Abbotsford worry about, and advocate against, pet pigeons because of diseases that birds can carry. Those infections include avian flu, the bloody spectre that has haunted local chicken farmers since a 2004 outbreak that led to the deaths of 17 million birds in the Fraser Valley.

In 2022, another outbreak of the virus—which is chiefly spread between farms by wild birds—killed or resulted in the destruction of about 3.6 million birds in the Fraser Valley.

The chair of the BC Poultry Association, Steve Heppell, wrote with “grave concern” to the committee.

“The commercial poultry sector in Abbotsford is one of the most intense and productive areas in Canada. I would like to see it remain so.”

“Pet pigeons could risk the health of hundreds of farms and thousands of birds at the cost of millions of dollars,” Heppell wrote. Even a whiff of avian flu on a poultry farm can cause an immediate and dramatic response, the destruction of thousands of birds, and expensive testing for all farms within the vicinity. It’s bad for birds, and bad for business.

Scientific evidence that pigeons pose a risk is less clear. Not all scientists agree with the level of risk Heppell paints pet pigeons with.

A local veterinarian who works with both wildlife and domestic pets, Dr. Ken Macquisten, wrote to the committee in support of Brar’s proposal. He disputed the idea that pigeons pose health risks to poultry with several peer-reviewed studies.

“Pigeons can be infected (however they are very resistant) but have not been shown to transmit avian influenza,” he said. He cited an article that collected the results of previous studies on the subject. While a few studies demonstrated that pigeons pose some risk of avian flu, the majority did not. The article concluded that columbids (a class of birds that includes pigeons and doves) are resistant to infection and can be considered “dead-end hosts.” Pigeons and doves can catch the virus, the article said, but don’t pass it on.

The vet also noted that pet pigeons don’t fit the definition of an agricultural use—nobody is eating their racing birds.

There’s an added ironic aspect to the poultry industry’s opposition to pet pigeons in the city, Brar said. Ensuring that pet pigeons can only be kept on farmland puts them closer to chicken farms than an urban flock would be. There’s a Rossdown Farms-brand poultry farm right down the road from Brar’s new farm.

The Current asked BC’s agriculture ministry about pigeons’ avian flu threat. On June 28, shortly after this story was first published, they provided a statement from BC’s Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr. Theresa Burns:

“B.C. egg and poultry farmers have shown great resolve and dedication in implementing biosecurity measures on their farms, and that will continue in the seasons and years ahead,” Burns said. “While there is always the risk of bird-to-bird transmission amongst domestic flocks, the main source of HPAI infection in B.C. and throughout Canada has been migrating infected waterfowl, with many studies over the last 80 years indicating the risk of transmission via domestic pigeons is comparably negligible. With the spring waterfowl migration over, the next high-risk period is anticipated to be the migration this fall, and the B.C. government will continue to work with producers, industry and federal partners to ensure on-farm biosecurity measures and response plans are in place, so British Columbians can continue to have a stable, local food supply.”

Big business, little birds

Standing on his farm next to his pigeon lofts, Brar wonders whether the result would have been different if he had presented to council again, instead of a committee made up of farmers. The farmers, business-owners themselves, would be more swayed by a poultry farmer’s case for limiting any and all risk in a million-dollar game of cat-and-mouse with a devastating disease than by his passion for pigeons, he said.

“Who did they kind of listen to? The million-dollar industry or the guy who has a hobby? So, there's a lot of pushback,” Brar said.

The shower begins to let up on the farm, leaving the cold air smelling like damp dogs and rain. The young pigeons who had gotten lost the day before perch on the slanting roofs of their lofts. They wait for Brar to let them through the gate.