This is a first attempt to translate my website in English.

My interests focus on all kinds of flying pigeons such as tumblers, highflyers, diving pigeons and tipplers. For the moment my stock consists primarily of flying tipplers and budapester highflyers. My experiences with budapesters are limited, so I mainly focus on the tippler.

The tippler is the marathon flyer among pigeons. They are selected on endurance and the fact that they should stay in the air as long as possible. Compared to racing pigeons, speed is not important. They make round trips around the loft in a distance of about 1 km. The record in Europa is made by Harry Shannon (Northern Ireland) with 22.05 hours. With a regular training and quality feeding times between 10 and 15 hours are really no exception. For endurance flights up to 20 hours the birds should be trained to fly at night. This is possible because they know their neighborhood and they land by getting trained on the lamp.

Tipplers are not popular in Belgium; they are kept by a few members (5 ?) of Belgische Roller club. The Belgian record is made by J. Van Ouwerkerk in 1993 with Meredith tipplers with a time of 19.20 for old birds and 18.25 for young birds. In the Netherlands the breed is more widespread, with two specialized clubs together counting about 100 members: Nederlandse Vliegtippler Club .

On this site you will find my experiences with flying tipplers. There is no final recipe for breeding an flying these birds and the situation might be different among lofts and breeders (strain, loft orientation, neighborhood, …). Visitors of this side might or might not agree with the methods used but bear in mind that everybody needs to find out things step by step.

On the web there are numerous sites which describe this bird; so I won’t repeat this here.

Keeping tipplers is not easy; because they like flying so much it is difficult to fly them during the winter: they might get lost due to unstable weather conditions or mist; my birds do not fly between October and March. That’s why I have some other breeds in my loft:

• Birmingham rollers these pigeons make multiple backwards salto’s while flying.
• The Canaria is a Spanish pigeon which is also very popular in the Netherlands but not in Belgium. They have an energetic flight and, despite of their bodily weight, fly very good. I also use them as dropper for my tipplers. You will find more information of this breed and related Spanish pigeons on the site of de Speciaalclub voor de Iberische Sierduivenrassen
• I also keep some white fantails which I use as dropper.
• In August 2008 I purchased three couples of Budapester Highflyers; these birds fly so high that it becomes difficult to observe them. Later I purchased a second breed in the Netherlands.