SALISBURY — One night, Grace Beard and her partner Jim Benton were sitting on their back porch enjoying themselves, when suddenly, Benton noticed something underneath a chair. It turned out to be a pigeon, but they could tell it wasn’t an ordinary one. They started following it around and determined it was not afraid of humans, then they discovered green and black bands on its legs.

“This bird belongs to somebody because it wouldn’t be marked like that and it was real tame, just very sweet,” Beard said. “I think that it heard us talking on the back porch and knew it was a safe place because the owner or the trainer spent a lot of time with the bird, talking to them, holding them, to make them very tame. I think it was comfortable coming over to our house.”

They tried to catch the pigeon, but it flew over to their neighbor’s house. The next morning, Benton found the pigeon standing outside their garage door where they were able to keep it this time. After taking pictures and video of the pigeon, Beard posted them on Facebook and began doing her own research online to find its owner. Beard eventually ran across the American Pigeon Racing Union’s website and they gave her the bird owner’s contact information after she shared with them the numbers on the bands attached to it.

“I learned about birds that I didn’t know before,” Beard said.

It turned out to be a homing pigeon that is used for racing. The owner of the pigeon was Scott Taylor, a member of the High Point Pigeon Club based in Randleman. Taylor installs floors for a living and initially became interested in pigeons 12 years ago when he observed some while he was working on a courthouse in Asheboro. Taylor caught them, took them home, and later released them. However, when he arrived at the courthouse the following day, they were back.

“I was probably 10 miles away from the courthouse and I’m like, ‘How’d these suckers get back?’ One of the county inspectors was telling me that they had that ability. So I sought out a local club and I’ve been president ever since,” Taylor said.

Fully grown homing pigeons can fly 60 miles per hour and at a distance of 600 miles in a day. They may seem like a pest, but before email, radio, text messaging and phone calls, people depended on pigeons to communicate with each other. Over time, they have been domesticated to the point where enthusiasts race them for fun and sport.

“It’s just amazing that they can do what they do. If you were to blindfold me and drive me down to Georgia and let me out, I would say, ‘Where am I at?'” Taylor said.

On Sept. 20, Taylor and members of his club were in Bishopville, S.C., to release 190 pigeons and have them race back to Randleman, over 100 miles away. Each registered pigeon has an identification band and a tracker chip, allowing a way for their owners to locate them in case they get lost. In Randleman, there is an antenna that the pigeons cross which logs their time. The pigeon with the highest yard per minute is the winner.

On that day, another pigeon club from Salisbury was also releasing pigeons for their own race, leading to confusion amongst the birds once they reached the sky. So instead of pigeons flying to Randleman, a few flew to Salisbury.

“If you think about a kid and he’s out playing and he sees a kid playing in the next yard, he wants to go over there and play with them. That’s kind of what happened, there’s a whole bunch of kids playing in the next yard and they went and played with them. Then they realized they got too far from home and were too tired to make it,” Taylor said.

In total, Taylor lost a dozen pigeons during the race, but he was grateful when Beard called him about finding one of them. He later drove to Salisbury to pick up the pigeon from Beard and Benton. Unfortunately, the pigeon died the next day and Taylor isn’t completely sure how.

“There’s just so many dangers in the world when they’re out of their little house, you always take a chance on them getting gone when you let them go,” Taylor said. “We spend so much money on health and well-being of these birds, they’re your children almost. You raise them from eggs, train them, teach them every day. When it comes time to in the fall to start flying their distances and you lose one and you’re attached to it, it breaks your heart.”

When given the news, Beard was shocked.

“I hate to hear that! That’s so sad, it was so sweet…That’s just really sad for me,” Beard said.

Even though it passed away, Taylor will continue to race his other pigeons this fall and next spring. Those birds will be flying high, but one might be little higher, looking down on them with its wings fully spread out.