Police last week recovered 13 stolen racing pigeons within 14 hours, as training intensifies ahead of spring competitions.
At about 6pm on Friday last week, police officers on patrol in New Taipei City’s Rueifang District (瑞芳) noticed that a vehicle had been parked for a long time in front of a restaurant that serves alcohol.
Suspecting the driver might be drunk, the officers slowly drove past to see if it would elicit a reaction. When the vehicle pulled out after them, they turned around and blocked it.
Photo copied by Lin Chia-tung, Taipei Times
While performing an alcohol test on the driver, surnamed Chang (張), the officers noticed a cooing sound coming from the trunk, where they said they discovered 11 pigeons, rope nets and other equipment for catching the birds.
Chang and a passenger, surnamed Lai (賴), said they caught the pigeons at Nuannuan Sports Park in Keelung to train for racing, not to hold for ransom, the officers said.
However, police discovered that Lai had been implicated in a Taipei pigeon extortion ring in 2015, while Chang had a record of stealing lumber.
Police said they believed the suspects were stealing racing pigeons to extort the owners for money.
At 8am the next day, an informant surnamed Yeh (葉) told Rueifang police that a group had discovered three pigeon thieves in the mountains between Keelung and Rueifang and were able to stop two from running away.
At the scene, police found two men, surnamed Hung (洪) and Lai (賴), with nets and two racing pigeons, and detained them on suspicion of theft.
Based on the tags around the pigeons’ legs, the 13 birds came from as far away as Taoyuan, Miaoli County and other regions, police said.
The owners did not yet know their pigeons had been stolen when police contacted them.
They thanked the officers for “holding on to the fruits of our training,” police said.
Pigeon racing has been a popular leisure activity among Taiwanese since the 1970s.
To compete, trained pigeons are released a set distance from their coops and timed to determine which returns the fastest.
Races are held four times a year to correspond with the seasons, one enthusiast said.
As the pedigree and training of the pigeons are critical to their performance, some enthusiasts buy purebred birds from Belgium, the Netherlands and other places for millions of New Taiwan dollars, in addition to the about 120,000 breeders in Taiwan who raise coveted breeds, statistics showed.
Considering their value, some people attempt to capture pigeons during training and extort their owners for their safe return.
Additional reporting by Cheng Ching-yi and Liu Ching-hou
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater